A Sailorman's Hymn
by vastderp
Summary: After finding the Psiioniic in a dream bubble, the Sufferer gets a second chance.


**Chapter One: Sirens Resound**

Somewhere on the edge of the black, a god-being lets out a sigh in the grip of its fathomless mad dreams. Bubbles are expelled in a rush of breath. All but a few float off into the endless night to burst and fade and mean nothing, gone and replaced and gone again in ponderous slow waves as the incomprehensible Other sleeps the eons away.

Some bubbles pick up odd hitchhikers from other worlds, and these last longer. Their dead inhabitants drift, unwatched and unremarkable, pantomiming the lives they have left behind for this new reality of cold black void. None of it means anything. It just _is_.

Communications are down. At the one minute mark post-failure, the first alert is sent out along the biowire to the standby engine crew, but the signal bounces. Navigation still functions, but there is no indication of space through which to move, and no sensation of forward motion when the engine flares into full burn. The external hull sensors are checked. No data is received. Proximity sensors are down, so the system sends its first distress call along the main grid to the on-board technicians. The signal bounces.

The system attempts to ping any other Fleet ships that might be in the region, and the signal bounces.

The system hesitates for five long seconds at the final step in the error report hierarchy, until the automatic override (designed a thousand sweeps ago to prevent internal sabotage caused by pilot instability) broadcasts a mayday directly to the Condesce along a closed-circuit backup network.

_And the signal bounces._

The emergency systems have been attempting to vent heat from the engine since the first alarm began to shrill, but because there is no response from the coolant system and no available temperature reading, a failsafe is tripped and the ship goes into red alert. In the event of catastrophic system failure, the primary grid must be powered down to prevent engine overheat and pilot malfunction. Manual assistance will be required to start it again.

Exactly ten minutes after the event, all power to the engine has been cut. Auxiliary lights come on in the chamber. Wan gray and green light, anemic and nauseating, illuminates wet bruise-purple biowire masses and gray flesh. Flickering red and blue sparks dim to a coal glow behind the headpiece of the pilot, installed in the center of the chamber. Absence of engine vibration allows the play of light on the pool to smooth, over a period of approximately fifteen mintues, into a gloss of faintly glowing seawater as still as glass. The system is now in hibernation until it can be attended, and the pilot begins to scream.

The Class 1 Imperial Battleship Official Disaster Protocols do not require a pilot to manually alert staff in the event of ship malfunction. The pilot is disciplined for unauthorized communication.

The Sufferer rolls the apple between his ash-gray palms, not hungry but needing something to do with his hands. The apple is cool and smooth and a little rubbery. Its skin is as red as candy, red as his blood. Red as the irons they used to burn him before he fucking died.

He is under an apple tree, in the garden, and it's the night before his death. His wrists are black and white, charred flesh and exposed bone, but because he's some kind of ghost his hands still work as well as they ever did. The sky overhead is salt sprayed across tyrian velvet, maybe a little cloudy. It will rain just before dawn, just before they come to take him away.

He reminds himself that this has all happened already, and no one else will come here unless he imagines them. A warm wind shakes the leaves of the tree and he smells the vinegar tang of the mushy wrinkled apples that have fallen into the grass. This garden is fenced, or beasts would have collected the fruit before it rotted.

_In the Sufferer's dreams, the _real_ dreams from before he became a dream himself, everyone picks the apples together, and there is a festival for the harvest. He remembers a girl with wild snarls of black hair to the backs of her dimpled knees, wrapped in a fine spiderweb gown. She spins across the dirt path, kicking up her bare feet and dancing, a whirl of laughing blue lips and lovely drunken cheers. She calls out to the Shepherd to come and dance. The Shepherd reaches unsteadily for another pitcher of cider, perhaps to bolster his courage, but his massive hand shakes and he upends the whole thing in an amber flood across the table. He blushes copper at the mess and waves off the shouts of glee from the crowd-_

Just like that, the world around him shifts, and now he begins to _see_ them, the fog and smoke wisps of lost celebrants and a flicker of one dancing girl and her stammering partner, and the night air smells of fried apple pastries and beer and the shit of herd beasts, and he can almost believe he really is sitting beneath a canopy that blocks out the murderous sun. If he wills it, all of this could become real.

A memory of a memory, watched by a memory. The recursion is enough to give him a fucking headache. The Sufferer sighs and pushes away this world that almost was, bringing back the night and the solitude. All of this is somehow his fault, and he never got to learn _why._ He will never find out the whole story. Learning is a gift that belongs to the living, and he's dead. Dead and exiled to this magic place that shifts and distorts with his desires. He is _over._ Wherever he is now, it is the epilogue. His quest to bring the water of understanding to the thirsty of his violent world has come to nothing more a splatter of piss soaking into parched earth.

A night creature rustles in the field beyond the fence, and yells at it to go choke on a dick. The rustling stops and he is alone again, tossing his candy-red apple between his sweaty hands and wondering where his fucking friends ended up.

Two exhaled yesterdays bump together in the dark.

The Sufferer looks up from his apple at the sound of a strangled shriek. Someone on the other side of the garden gate is screaming, and he is pretty sure it's not a memory. Unless that's what he sounded like when the assholes were burning him. The memory of that last few hours is still a bit confusing, and thinking about it now causes wisps of smoke to rise from his ruined wrists again, but there is no further pain. He has mastered the trick of turning off pain in the endless days since he came here.

He concentrates on a memory of that final, glorious fight with the Condesce's guard, sees the sickle point bury itself in the the neck of an indigoblood with a skull painted white on his grinning face. Flaming yellow eyes roll back and are barely widening in death when the weapon is yanked free, grating on bone and flinging drops of blood as it tears loose. The Sufferer banishes the dying troll and the rain of blood, but keeps the sickle. Dead or not, he's got a lifetime of survival behind him and old habits die hard.

He flings the gate open and steps through into...

Well, what the shit is this?

He's never been on a ship before, but he's seen movies. The decor is rusty and the lighting sucks ass, but otherwise it's a battleship hallway. He turns and the gate is still behind him, old and warped and wooden, and the garden beyond that. The transition from Alternian hillside to dim humming ship corridor is seamless but there's a sort of blur where it all hangs together.

Someone screams again, and the lights go out. Somewhere, a computer is droning on and on with a pattern of beeps and alarm tones. In the movies, there would be guards racing around with weapons drawn, hunting the mutantblood discovered in their midst. This place remains empty. Not a movie, not a memory. Something new.

The Sufferer shrugs and enters the ship.

The engine is cold by now. It has been fifteen hours, twenty minutes and five seconds since communications went down. Surveillance has failed. The world has shrunk to a sphere roughly half the size of the ship. One terminal at the base of the tangle of biowire, behind the pilot, has been activated to allow for manual intervention.

Alarms are going off. This is perceived as a program running successfully on the system, and confirmed by the ear of the pilot. A recorded voice (not the pilot's) explains the shutdown, urges personnel to cut power to non-essential devices for the duration of the emergency, and to be vigilant for any signs of additional sabotage.

Every twenty five seconds there is a reassuring stabbing sensation behind the pilot's eyes, indicating that power is being siphoned into life support. The system is programmed to draw only from the pilot in situations where the engine is forced to shut down and is considered routine. It will continue until crewmembers arrive.

With no further available disaster protocols to follow, the system is idle. The pilot opens a channel on the crippled communication system and sends static through all accessible sections of the ship. Because this is not standard protocol in an emergency situation, it activates the deterrent subroutine written to dissuade tampering attempts via unpleasant physical stimuli. This program has not been activated in four sweeps, two perigees, forty three hours, five minutes and fifty two please god help me seconds. It is not intended to be used during an emergency because an excess of adrenaline reduces the perception of physical distress and can damage the hardware.

For seventeen seconds, all functioning alarms are crowded out by electronic feedback.

The pilot recovers from the expected reaction to the painful stimuli following the sabotage and immediately floods the audio channel with a second, more powerful burst of static. The deterrent subroutine is designed to increase the level of painful stimulus help me i don't know what to do with each subsequent sabotage attempt. The actions of the pilot, if maintained, threaten to damage the system.

A red light begins to flash on the console, but squeals of static drowns out the torrent of new alarm noises.

The Sufferer walks the single corridor for what seems like hours, not even wincing at the periodic bursts of static over the intercom. After the first few nasty shocks, it's not much different from being surrounded by assholes with blaster rifles. Here and there he finds hatchways, but none of them will open for him. When he looks through the windows, there are masses of red and blue tentacles filling every single one. They writhe against the unbreakable portals, leaving thick smears of pinkish slime across the glass. Whenever the intercom fills with static, he hears wet hammering through the heavy metal of the doors. Like the noise itself hurts the masses of coiling tentacles.

He's starting to seriously rethink this whole exploration thing. He clutches his sickle in one hand and the mutant-red apple in the other, and turns around to go back.

But now there is no hallway. Just a wall with a black door set into it. The window has been painted black, but through scratches and chips in the paint he can see vivid flickering lights. Blue, red, blue, red. Violet-violet-violet. The lights in his hallway dim and flare to its rhythm. Another burst of static, this time lasting only a second or so. And there's that horrible scream again, and the Sufferer is certain that whoever it is is other side of the door. He turns again, and there's the wall and the black door again. Blue, red, blue, red. Violet-violet-violet-violet. The message here is obvious: _you aren't going anywhere, asshole._

He hangs his sickle from the belt loop of his trousers and reaches for the knob in the silence. Whoever it is has stopped screaming.

Personnel capable of rendering manual assistance arrives approximately (?) days (?) into the emergency. The life support systems continue to be maintained but the system has had a number of malfunctions in its calendar system. The date is 5/5/309805. The previous day's date also reads as 5/5/309805, as does the day before that. The corrupt data has rendered the calendar subroutine unreliable. Time measurements begin to distort. The resulting junk data, and the anomalous programming that has caused it, cannot be deleted or corrected without manual assistance. The continuing failures cause the pilot distress, but help me please kill me a technician has been detected in the command chamber.

The pilot immediately ceases interfering with the communications channel. The alarms howl on.

The system awaits instruction.

The tentacle-things glimpsed behind every closed door in that long hallway appear to converge in this single, strange chamber. Rising up from the water into a single pillar of undulating flesh, they look like a knot of bloated monstrous worms climbing out of a lake. The pilot, the obvious source of the screams, is installed at the center of the mass, chest-deep in biowire that snakes up like creeping vines to bury pinpoint tips under the skin and merge with the nervous system. More living wire drips down from the ceiling in a single stalactite of pink tendrils, swallowing both arms and creeping down the head of the thrashing troll like sinister little fingers. Yellow blood is spattered all down the face and chest of the pilot, poured down the tentacles like a container of paint, running down to the edge of the water in clots and great spattery drips. Some of the blood is dry and flaking free. Some is shining wet under the low emergency lights.

He knows a little bit about what he's seeing, had it explained to him sweeps ago. This mass of pulsating flesh is basically a huge nervous system, a network of bioengineered tissue functioning as the mind of the entire ship, controlled by the poor bastard wearing the headset. From how hard the pilot is struggling, the goggles would fly off if they weren't hooked into his face by subcutaneous strands of biowire and secured to his double set of horns for good measure.

Double horns and yellow blood. His eyes widen. And the face, though contorted in pain...

_The Psiioniic shows the Signless the headset he stole when he escaped his Imperial ship, pointing out all of the wires and explaining how it works. The technobabble is more or less impenetrable, but the Signless pretends to follow every word. "And this lets you power an entire ship?" he asks, and presses a finger to the tip of one wilting frond of biowire. Something inside the rubbery mass jabs, and a bead of candy-red blood wells up instantly. "MotherFUCK!" he shouts, and sticks his abused finger in his mouth. The Psiioniic laughs maybe a little bit too loudly and tells him that's why he's here with the traitorous mutant with the big red target painted on his ass and not out in space being all he can be. He doesn't even like getting his blood drawn these days, and still can't stand small places._

Imagine spending the next ten sweeps wearing one of these godawful things and watching losers in uniforms take dumps over the surveillance system,_ he says, hissing all his 's' sounds even after all these sweeps of trying to conquer his own tongue. _Bloody screaming doomed rebellion seems like a better way to go out, if you ask me._ The Psiioniic takes the headset back and stows it in his work cabinet while the Signless pokes at his tingling fingertip and morbidly watches to see if it will keep bleeding. _

_The Psiioniic then explains how he intends to reverse-engineer the something in order to learn how the something something works, because if they can synchronize the blah blah blah with their own computers they can hack the signal of the Imperial broadcast station and the revolution has an actual chance of being fuckin' _televised._ This excited chatter goes on for at least an hour whether the Signless wants to hear it or not, because when his comrade is in this sort of mood he actually sort of _can't_ shut the fuck up, but the general idea is that it might help the Movement, so the Signless tries to look suitably impressed until he can finally get away and have his goddamn dinner, which is probably completely cold by now, fuck you very much._

No, no, they can't do this. No.

Fucking _no._

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 2: Object Lesson<strong>

But they obviously _did, _and the Sufferer has no idea why he even bothers to be surprised at this point. He's fought the Empire for sweeps over exactly this kind of casual systematic brutality. They got their claws on a revolutionary and his inner circle-what was he expecting, a sweep of community service? They would want to make an example of the upstart lowblood, something suitably caste-appropriate, as an object lesson to the lower classes. _This is what the Empire will do to you, and your neighbors in bondage will fucking cheer._

Pressing a yellowblooded psionic rebel into service of the empire, where he would presumably be used to crush his revolutionary brothers and sisters, would be irresistible. This is the justice of the parasite world sucking the life out of the Alternia of his dreams. Of fucking _course_ they did it.

"I'm here," he calls, and his voice is dreadfully flat. It's that or flip the fuck out. "I heard you and I'm here, and I'm going to pull you out of that thing right fucking now. Hang on a little bit longer, okay?"

The Psiioniic shows no sign of having heard any of this, or of having noticed the presence of the Sufferer at all. Maybe it's because he's plugged in.

Waist-deep in the water, wading toward the central pillar of living cable, he really wishes he could conjure up the Empress, the real Empress and not just a dream-vision pulled from his memories, and spit in her painted face.

He's heard of worse punishments for treason. Looking back from the other side of his own death, he considers himself a little bit lucky that the worst they did to him was cook his arms, beat the shit out of him and use him for target practice.

If the Psiioniic is here, he's dead. Bled out all over those snaked cables and escaped his nighmare in the only way he had left, and good for him. Maybe it was even suicide, a final act of rebellion. _You can't own me._ The Sufferer approves, and his heart hurts just that little bit more.

Shitty place to spend an afterlife, the Sufferer thinks, but at least he's free now. The Sufferer doesn't know what became of the Dolorosa, whom he called _mother_ and his beloved Disciple, but he assumes their fates were equally symbolic and degrading. Maybe they'll show up when they die, and he'll have the full picture on just how badly he fucked up. The least he can do is apologize to each of them for failing to be anything more to the world than yet another culled nuisance. Would any of this have happened if he had been caught and killed during his violent days, before he chose to walk the stupid fucking path of peace?

"Hang on," he says again, stupidly, "I'm coming to get you out. Just wait a little longer while I figure out how, okay?" It sounds so completely lame. There will be a time to say the other things later. Right now, he has to stop this.

The water of the pool is cold and drags on his heavy cloak and boots. Salt stings the dead flesh of his burnt-down wrists, and he doesn't bother to tell the pain to go away. He strips the sodden cloak from his back and drops it to sink abandoned to the chamber floor, a few steps along from where he absently unhooked and dropped the sickle. The apple bobs on the surface behind him, candy-red in the gloom. He doesn't remember dropping the apple but he needs both hands to climb the tangle, so it's all right. In time it will disappear like all the other forgotten things in this microcosm of life.

At the base of the pillar, the Sufferer takes a double fistful of grotesque pink meat, living vines that look thick enough to take his weight, and digs one heavy boot deep into the mass to boost himself up. He slips off almost instantly, comically, landing on his back in the pool and sinking down into it and soaking the rest of his clothes and hair and getting water up his nose and down his throat. He wrestles himself free and sputters out a string of curses through a mouthful of brine, and tries not to think about how long this water has spent festering in the chamber and what might be in it.

"Son of a fucking bitch," he snarls. "I can't climb this shit. Hang on." Again with the _hang on,_ like there's any other option. Like the Psiioniic can just stroll the fuck away from all of this.

Well, can't he?

The Sufferer's first memory of the afterlife was of being in the garden alone on that final night, knowing what awaited in the morning and trying to accept it and failing, god, fucking _failing_ the way he always failed. He had been in the garden, and things had gone pretty much the same way in the memory as they had in real life, right up until the fuckers chained him to the flogging jut, and then the first deja vu had kicked in. It had still taken him a while to realize that all of this had happened already, and even longer to remember that it had ended in his death. The thud of an arrow into his gut followed a sudden memory of being shot, and it was then, noting the lag between memory and pain, that he finally began to suspect he was dreaming. If he hadn't slipped into a pain-hazy fantasy of breaking free of the burning shackles, a longing that somehow shifted into reality (or whatever he should call it; he knows perfectly well that absolutely nothing here is real) and dumped him on the ground, he might still be on the jut right now. Replaying and replaying his torture and death forever.

It might be the same for the Psiioniic. Who even knows how long he's been dead? Time is obviously an illusion here. He doesn't look any older from what the Sufferer can see of him, which isn't much. Just his face and hair, buried in traceries of clawed mechanical veins. Maybe the poor asshole got lucky and his ship was destroyed a few perigees into his service. It might have been only a sweep since the Sufferer's execution. Maybe he's only just arrived.

He should tell his friend the truth and put an end to it, but the words won't come out. Not like this, staring up at the abomination from the floor. He owes the Psiioniic a reassuring hand when he gives him the news. He will help him out of the column and out of this place and apologize for the epic clusterfuck that is, after all, the only thing the Signless ever had to give the world.

He has to get up there, but how?

The thick wads of slime from the control vines take forever to rinse out from between his fingers. It clings to his skin as he scrubs at it, until finally his hands feel clean again. His ears ring with the endless alarms. He makes his way back through the chamber and examines the scaffold steps leading from the doorway to the pool. The frame is secured to the wall and floor with tamper-proof bolts. He thinks about the tools that might be required to break it loose, but they do not appear. He leaves this problem for later revisitation and wades back to the center of the chamber, exploring the other side of the central mass. There's got to be some sort of ladder or platform. How else could they perform maintenance?

_Maintenance._The thought makes him shudder. Like a piece of tech you can break and fix and break and fix until one day you just throw the whole broken mess away. He knows this is how some of the Imperial ships operate. That's one of the things the Movement existed to fight against. But to see it up close, to see the reality of this hybrid monstrosity that used to be a person, used to be his closest friend-to see TA reduced to hardware-he had thought the worst was over after his death, but the universe clearly wasn't done fucking him yet.

And whose fault is it that the Psiioniic had died this death? Oh, that's right. The asshole who talked him into poking Her Condescension with a stick in the first place. Well done, Signless, you fucking grub. Well fucking done.

There's no ladder behind the pillar, but he finds a command console recessed into the tangle. The screen protruding from the tentacle mass is blank. The keyboard is suspended a few inches from the surface of the water and lights flicker along it, indicating that it is powered on and hibernating. A red button with no label flashes to the left of a bank of mysterious switches.

He stands over it, debating. Nothing will actually happen if he presses the button, since none of this is real. But years of having his technical incompetence rubbed in his face by the Psiioniic have made him hesitant to fuck around with hardware he doesn't understand. What if he sets off an imaginary explosion that the Psiioniic believes into reality, and the ship actually does blow up? Will it disappear again?

The Sufferer can't let him go on this way. He couldn't save anyone in life, and he'll be damned if he carries that failure into the afterlife.

So he concentrates on what he wants: a stepladder, a system manual, a fucking bottle of whiskey for his aching head, a crowbar, a chainsaw, world peace. None of these items appear, and he frowns. When he is in his garden, he can feel something like _listening_ when he does the visualization thing, just before whatever it is becomes real. This place feels... not deaf, exactly, but...

"I need a ladder or something," he says out loud. No reaction from the universe, no reaction from the Psiioniic. The body in the wires hangs from its useless arms with arcs of red-blue lightning crawling from time to time down its bloody front. The Sufferer opens his mouth to say something, but there are just no words there. He refuses to tell his friend to _hang on_ again. He's a leader of men, not a squirming wiggler. He knows when to shut the fuck up and project confidence, and that's what he needs to do now. If the Psiioniic hears him at all, he knows rescue is at hand. Anything more will just make him seem uncertain.

He bites his lip and hammers the flashing button, mentally begging it to not blow anything up.

The alarms cease throughout the ship, so abruptly the echoes seem to be caught off-guard and go on far too long. The light on the console goes dark, and the red-blue-violet flashing from the Psiioniic ceases.

The monitor comes alive, shifting dead black to bright black, and a cursor blinks sickly sopor-slime green at the top. There is a long moment as the system wakes, and text appears.

**emergency mode**

**network unavailable this command station is locked please input your password to access the menu _**

At least it's not .~ath gibberish, but without a password it's still good for fuck-all.

He returns to the front of the living pillar and looks up at the Psiioniic. "I'm going to look for a way to get you out of that thing," he says, and makes for the door. This time when he opens it, there is no hallway that stretches for miles through the ship. Only a broad stripe of velvet red early morning sky, and the garden of contemplation where he once saw the end of violence as his greatest weapon against the Empire and was dumb enough to call it _epiphany_ instead of _bullshit._ The garden where he finally let them take him.

The grass beneath the tree is rendered in ashy greens and grays that soothe his eyes after hours of glaring neon and flashing emergency lights. A warm night wind blows into the chamber, chasing out stale breath and the stink of living tissue macerating in old dead seawater.

The Sufferer steps through the hatch and into his garden, willing the ship to still be here when he returns.

* * *

><p>Chapter 3: ÄšhÁŒÓ<p>

_The Psiioniic pulls the Signless into himself with his free arm, craving his warmth under their shared blanket. "You know we're all going to die, asshole," he tells the prophet who brought him forth from slavery and gave him a dream to chase. From his tone of voice, he might be pointing out a particularly interesting constellation. The rock they're leaning against might as well be ice. The Dolorosa and the Disciple are two warm bundles of blanket on the other side of their small fire, which no one has bothered to feed for the past hour. This scrubby patch of dirt on the edge of the city is their last taste of paradise, gritty and imperfect, and neither can sleep._

_"Thanks for the news flash, _athhole,"_ the Signless mocks, and shakes off the Psiioniic's hand. He's always tense and grumpy on these nights, nothing like the master of serenity the people have begun to make him out to be. "How many guards does this place have, again?"_

_"You know, I didn't even bother to count." The Psiioniic likes to let on he's too jaded to be scared shitless. It's part of his charm, the Signless thinks. "But it's cool. You're gonna stand up and _forgive_ them all to death, right?"_

_"You don't have to stick around," the Signless growls._

_"Of course I do, you goddamn fanatic." the Psiioniic snorts. He doesn't say why, and doesn't have to. "And you know I'm not the only one. Idiocy is catching."_

"Thanks for being my idiot, then, I guess," the Signless grumbles, and the Psiioniic elbows him in that special way that means "you're welcome."

_"Do you... really think it'll be that bad?"_

_"Yeah. I do." The Psiioniic taps his head with his fingertip. "Getting noisy in here." _

_"Fuck."_

_"Stars are nice, though." The Psiioniic says._

_"Yeah."_

_The Psiioniic puts his arm around the Signless, and this time it is allowed to stay. The frost-bright stars reflect in their eyes as they consider the night. The Disciple mutters something in sleeptalk and is silent. It's a cold wind that blows across the dying campfire, but it's theirs. _

The Sufferer wastes no time. He's barely put his soaking boots in the grass before he clears his thoughts as best he can and imagines the things he needs. To his relief, they appear at his feet instantly. He dries himself off as an afterthought, gathers the items, and re-enters the ship. The corridor is back, and he snarls and wishes he'd thought to make a pack to carry all this shit.

**please input your password to access the menu please input your password to access the menu please in please pleaccessacce ssdeniedÿØÿà JFIF ÿÛ C**

**$.' ",#(7),01444'9=82.342ÿÛ C **

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It takes almost an hour to find the door again, and this time it's red instead of black. Emergency lights waver and cast his shadow spidery and long down the hallway. He reaches for the handle, but the door swings open without being touched. The Sufferer hurries through it.

"I'm back," he tells the room. The body in the wires is slack. Maybe he's asleep. Do pilots sleep? "Only a few more minutes now and we'll leave this shitty place forever."

The ladder is sturdy metal, and when he sets it up he can tell right away that it will put him eye-to-eye with his captive friend. He recovers his sickle from the bottom of the pool and climbs with his free hand.

Up close, he can see where the needle tips of the wires bury themselves under the skin of the Psiioniic's face. He only hesitates a moment before he reaches up to lay his wet bare palm against the cheek, which is free of the overgrowing vines and headset. At his touch, the Psiioniic whips his head away and begins, yet again, to struggle in his bonds.

"It's all right," The Sufferer says. "It's me."

The visible parts of the pilot's face look pretty much the same as the last time they spoke, that last exchange of words spat through bloody lips guards dragged him away. He is no older. The Sufferer tells himself that means he can't have been here long.

"Listen," he says, uncertain how to explain this without sounding ridiculous. "You and me, we're dead. We both died and now we're in some kind of magic afterlife world. It starts out as a dream, and I guess you're dreaming about this fucked up place."

No reaction.

"I don't know if you can hear me right now, but this is me promising that I'm not going to leave until you're out of that thing."

He takes the ensuing silence as an invitation. Time for reunions later, then, after he's undone this obscenity.

The headset should come off, but it will be a delicate job and he doesn't want to be fucking around with needles while that goggled head is whipping around on him. So. Hack him free, get him out of here, then pull out the needles. God, he hopes there aren't any on the inside of those goggles.

He sits back on the top of the ladder and studies the slowly swaying stalactite of tentacles. Looking for the right place to bury the sickle. He selects the thickest one and slashes at it experimentally.

All of this happens in one frantic moment: the tentacle spasms. A gush of magenta fluid sprays from the wet maw he's created, hosing down the front of his shirt in a hot spray that immediately slows to an ooze. The Psiioniic shrieks right in his face. This last surprise elicits a grunted cry of "shit!" as the Sufferer barely avoids falling backwards off the ladder.

"I'm sorry," he tells the Psiioniic, and reaches out to touch his face again, which only makes his friend struggle harder, until the Sufferer can't stand to see it anymore and quits. He's doing this all fucking wrong, as usual, making everything so much worse than it already has to be.

The stuff soaking into his clothing smells like blood, probably _is_ blood, but he can also see frayed wires poking out from the wound he's made, sparking clean yellow-white instead of the blue and red of the Psiioniic. The gaping wound runs deep, but he'll need to hack through a black central cable as thick as his forearm in order to sever it. And he obviously can't do that without hurting the Psiioniic.

The door to the chamber slams shut behind him. The Sufferer turns just in time to see the whole hatchway disappear, leaving a smooth bulkhead and a set of scaffolding steps that lead nowhere. A siren begins to shrill, and a female voice informs him over and over again that the control room has been isolated and personnel is on the way. The screaming goes on and on, one long cracking note that wavers like a dying animal running out of breath and how is he even breathing enough to sustain a noise like that?

The Sufferer guesses it's easy if you don't have to breathe.

Fuck. Fuck. Chopping him free isn't going to work.

(Rµ!Ð 9&–"dR'œSabotage unauthorized activity detected defensive grid partially nonfunctional countdown( Ïµ4SÁÅ!àgÁâ"Œ€94…¾œûÐ îF)N{R1L$ŠAÏZ\p{ÒúÒËiØÅ ÖÉ¦!™çÒž¾ input password to access menu please inp ssword where i am date and time want

The voice repeats her warning three more times, then informs him that the chamber will be flooded unless he inputs the stupid password. He descends the ladder and crosses back to the console, shivering a little. For a memory, the water feels goddamn cold. He imagines how drowning in it will feel. He may be dead, but he's willing to bet the experience will still suck.

When he sees the masses of new text that have appeared on the monitor, it's like the breath has been pulled out of his lungs. For long moments, he cannot breathe.

"Is that you?" he asks the pillar, skimming over line after line. "Is that you trying to talk to me?"

New text appears on a freshly blanked screen.

**password not accephelpme**

"Oh fuck," he breathes. "You _can_ hear me. Oh fuck. Oh fuck. I missed you so much. I'm here, I'm here and I'm going to save you, okay? _FUCK."_

**password not accÄšhÁž™¤ç9ãñ¤‚—¸ã¥ ÐûRM8‚1HOÆ/j éš ÷§j7õ¨ÜdÔŠŒƒžzSB çû¦Š"åô¢¨bã'NôìšBpÐ"1×/= À4p$piÀóÅ7Šrõ¤ÞÓµRv¤ƒŠw˜)**

"What is this? What's all this garbage text?"

**password not acceptedcorruptdata**

"You can't talk to me without the password, yeah, I got that. So what's the fucking password?"

**¤ƒŠw˜) æŽ#ò¤ÈéMÝHI§`™sKž**

There is a hiss from the wall to his left, and the pool begins to bubble. Cold fingers of moisture begin stroking along his hips, climbing. In a few moments the keyboard will be underwater.

How's he supposed to guess the stupid password? These big galaxy-jumpers have uncrackable security systems, he can't-but no, that's bullshit. This _isn't_ a galaxy-jumper, not anymore. If the screaming thing in the pilot's helm wants him to guess it, he'll guess it.

"Psiioniic!" he says.

**password not accepted**

"Bicyclops. Bifurcation. Red. Blue."

**paswwhered**

"Duality. Mind honey. You remember the fucking mind honey, TA? You remember that?" The keyboard submerges and exhales a tiny stream of bubbles. He suspects it's waterproof, but he sure as hell isn't, and in a moment he is going to be treading water while he argues with a bullshit imaginary security system, and he's starting to think from looking at this screen that his good buddy is maybe a little tiny bit crazy from whatever they did to him-

**password not accepted**

"FUCK! Dolorosa. TwoApostles. CausticGnosis. ArtisticCatechism. GloriousAbdication. Disciple. Signless. Visions. Alternia. God, I don't know-fuck the Empress. Revolution. Down with the goddamn rotten fucking Empire!" He rattles off every important thing he can think of that the two of them shared. Dirty jokes. Mean nicknames. Lost friends. All 48 of the constellations in one long breathless drone. He raises his head to speak above the level of the seawater and rises to the tips of his toes. The bottom line of the monitor ripples under an inch of ocean, but he can read the wavering text.

**pawhoareyoussword**

Shit. Did he try his name? He doesn't think he did. The real name, not the title he gave himself when he hit adulthood, or the honorific given to him when he found his calling. Nobody knows that but his closest allies. All at once he understands what the system has _really_ been asking for all along.

_Confirmation._

He yells his secret name with a sort of ragged triumph. It's almost anticlimactic when the screen clears and a new line of text replaces the rows of prompts and increasingly incoherent fragmants of text.

**access granted welcome administrator you have 749,034,892 messages awaiting attention 700,489,403 of which are flagged 'urgent' you may input commands manually or by voice command glory to the empire**

"Yeah, all praise to Fish Lips, may she be fucked forever by a pack of rabid wolves," he says. "Can you drain the water out of here? I can't swim for shit."

* * *

><p>Chapter 4: malfunction<p>

**processing****water removal will be complete in 35 seconds**

There is a moment of ominous grinding. He can hear it through the water, which is hitting him in the ears with every movement of his head. Then the water level begins rapidly to fall, leaving him merely cold and soaked and probably looking like an asshole. Drains set against the walls pump the last inches of sloshing salt water out of the command center, and he is left standing in a puddle. _Behold, o people of Alternia. This is the face of your revolution._

"Thanks," he tells the Psiioniic. "Now, how am I supposed to get you out of that thing?"

**invalid syntax**

"Well, obviously I can't cut you free. Can't you just tell the machines to let you go, or something? Is there a switch?"

**invalid syntax rephrase**

Fuck. "Are you, or are you not, able to get loose on your own? TA, man. Psiioniic. Talk to me. That _is_ you, right? I'm not just alone in here with a computer?"

** faultfault CG term psiioniic returns 1 result CG _ psiioniic has been assigned to galaxy jumper class battleship condescension system designation has been updated to helmsman**

"So you got a promotion. Good for you. I can't say I think much about the fringe benefits, though. And what's this shit about 'the system?' Am I talking to the ship or the pilot right now?"

**the pilot does not have communication privilegesCG you are speaking to the system CG**

"And the system just happens to know my old trolltag. Okay, I buy that. I'm the admin, now let me talk to your pilot."

Long hesitation. The Sufferer clenches his hands into fists and feels his claws bite into the skin of his palms, the sting of salt in tender crescents of damaged flesh reminding him of just how uncannily real this not-place is. Realer than his garden by far. Real enough to make this escape so much harder than he thought it would be.

Finally, the system responds.

**your command cannot be executedplease**

"What? Why not?"

**the system is damaged and the pilot is unstable**

"Story of his life. I still want to talk to him. What's stopping me?"

**last diagnostics check was completed fifteen hours two minutes five seconds ago malicious programming was detected the system is not authorized to deleteCG CG CG CG CG CG CG CG the corrupt data without password authentication the ship is experiencing catastrophic failures. would you like to scan again**

"No, I want to talk to my friend. The pilot or whatever you call him. Now."

**security measure twenty two dash six permits admin override resulting pilot malfunction may be irreversible do you wish to continue stopithurts**

"Fine, I get it. Never mind." The Sufferer scowls. "What hurts?"

**disregard unauthorized communication the system is under attack by malicious data readout text may appear corrupted**

"Doesn't look all that random to me," the Sufferer grumbles. "Okay. Let's try something else. Tell me about your pilot."

**this galaxy jumper class starship contains one living pilot of the yellow blood caste whose innate psionic abilities make it an ideal vector for interface primary tasks include powering subspace travel life support navigation threat detection _ pilot vital signs are available and may be accessed or altered by voice command only _ pilot is CG—¸QŠÒcXúö…ˆ,E¥ÍÍÄP†V ±#$ƒZÜ"AjéÝW 'n"wiNÝ¥Ø·× Ò±að½¬KjÕë}•÷C™ÏÊ¸#o¹úûÖösÐÒÐÒ{— "‚´YÎ\øÂâ[Ý·7°Cz ¸‚ ¶Æìz¾1Ô÷ì{Š³‡míõHoã»»óa€[(wVIäg9Í]Õ5;}#O–úè°† Ø2X" is malfunctioning CG**

"No shit he's _malfunctioning,_ he's dead and you've still got him wired into a fucking imaginary spaceship!" the Sufferer runs his hands through his dripping hair. "FUCK. Okay. Next idea. What about you? What are you?"

**i am the Helmsman the Helmsman system monitors and provides support for the following onboard functions _ life support communications surveillance weapons calibration CG pilot has requsÖŠ"ð¢thorization interface with the pilot is not permitted access menu y/n _**

He reads through the list but can't think of anything useful to do with it. "Not right now," he says. "I was more curious about how you fit together. How much of you is _him?"_

**define him**

All right, that time he definitely detected hesitation. This might be the right track after all. "What I mean to ask, computer, is _where's your brain?_ Are you the tentacles, the wire, some disembodied brain in the cargo bay? Or is there a big bank of cirtuitry somewhere in a wall panel I'm talking to right now?"

**the system operates on pilot hardware**

"For fuck's sake." the Sufferer takes a breath. "So you _are_ him."

**_ _ _ _AcŒž8É yes CG displays of corrupt data have been increasing a number of anomalies interfere with system accuracy communications are down speed and position of craft cannot be calculated proximity to nearby objects is unknown these errors threaten system integrity and may lead to catastrophic pilot failure time and date cannot be retrieved would you like to perform maintenance ò‚Ç- signlessCG**

"I'm here." He addresses this to the hanging body, which continues to breathe and occasionally twitch, but otherwise shows no signs of being part of a conversation. "I'm figuring it out, but you know how I am with computers, and your ship parts are being an asshole." He turns back to the monitor. "All right. System. What kind of maintenance do you need?"

**reconfiguration is required the system is experiencing an emergency of unknown origin various data points across the ship do not respond**

The Sufferer grimaces. "And that's why you're in pain."

**yes the system experiences the anomaly as distressing corruption of data appears to be the result of malicious code this code will need to be removed from the system by an authorized agent**

"And if I can fix your problems, it will be safe to talk to the pilot?"

**the pilot is malfunctioning.**

"I FUCKING GET THAT ALREADY, THANKS!" He wants to tear his hair out. "How do I _stop_ it?"

**pleaseCGCGCGCGCG let me die CGplease CG dont let**

He is still reading the rapid scroll of text, mouth coming open with no words behind a dry tongue, when there is a horrible scream of static from all around him. It's like the walls themselves are crying out in one long note of machine agony. The organs of his body, his dead body that still has a pulse and still breathes, vibrate to its frequency.

"Shit!" he claps his hands over his ears, which only blunts the worst of it. "I'm sorry!" What he's sorry for, he doesn't know, only that he won't be doing it again anytime soon if he can avoid it. His imaginary ears will be ringing for days after this. "STOP IT!"

The feedback noise cuts off, but the quiet seeps back in like a fog, slowly covering the jagged silence left by the metal scream. The Sufferer suspects this is how a machine throws a tantrum, and wishes, paradoxically, that he had the old Psiioniic here to help him with this. At least his friend could only make you _wish_ you were deaf in his more combative childish moods.

Meanwhile the body of his friend has gone limp in his tangle of biowire. His head hangs between his arms, chin touching his chest where a fresh smear of yellow blood has covered his uniform.

New text has appeared on the monitor, and this time it is not sopor green, but candy red.

**ERROR ERROR ERROR HARDWARE MALFUNCTION PILOT HAS BEEN DISCIPLINED FOR BREACH OF PROTOCOL DETERRENT CANNOT EXCEED MAXIMUM SET LEVEL HELMSMAN SYSTEM IS NOW DORMANT EMERGENCY POWER RUNNING AT 98.4% INPUT ADMINISTRATOR-LEVEL PASSWORD TO CONTINUE _ _ _ _ **

_Goddamn it._ What did he fuck up this time?

"TA...? Did I just kill you?" _Again?_

The Sufferer moves closer to examine the body. Worry stabs at his guts, like the shocking slap of the seawater on his warm skin, like the invisible blade that went through his chest and twisted the moment he first recognized the Psiioniic strung up there, a living piece of equipment.

The body is definitely still breathing. Whatever that counts for in the afterlife, he still at least believes himself to be alive enough to need air. And at least he's not screaming. The Sufferer hopes desperately that this is a good sign, but suspects it's the opposite.

But maybe it's better if the Sufferer leaves him like that for a while. Long enough to make some kind of plan to get the goddamn Helmsman to let the Psiioniic go. _And how am I meant do that? How do I talk a computer out of being a computer?_

He finally gives in and sits on the still-wet floor, pressing his soggy back to the horrible cold give of the bioware snaking up from the floor. He pulls his knees to his chest, rests his head on his folded arms, and tries to keep himself from thinking too hard about the ugly little ramifications of that word.

_Malfunction._ And holy fuck, if _that's_ not an understatement...

He thinks instead, selfishly, about his garden.

* * *

><p>Chapter 5: insomnia<p>

_It's the middle of the light season. The punishing Alternian sun is always dipped just below the horizon, near enough to keep tempers high and all hope of rest just beyond the reach of the Signless. He's always had trouble sleeping, since before he can even remember. The Dolorosa speaks often of his late-afternoon tantrums. How she would pace up and down the hallway of her tiny hive with her fretful charge in her arms, until she was sagging and desperate for rest, near tears from the frustration. Pacing and pacing until his temperament took enough pity on her frayed nerves and, at last, allowed him to sleep. She speaks as if this waking nightmare is her fondest memory. "My squalling little grub," she says, looking far away and very young._

_He's in the garden now, alone, restless and gritty with the insomnia, and there are no stars because the twin glare of the moons and the perpetual dawnlight crowds them out of the sky. The weather of the mid-second spring can be fickle, but it's warm enough now that he shucks off his cloak and wads it into a pillow between his neck and the rough bark of the tree. He can't sleep because he keeps remembering, and he can't remember enough to let him relax._

_In his dream, there are hordes of tiny grinning beasts who take the shapes of the dead, mocking parodies of lost loved ones. Spirits of the dead rise and whisper prophecy and nonsense, guiding him through strange lands. In this dream, he and his companions-always the same twelve, their familiar and dear faces gone pale as campfire ash-stand clinging to one another on an endless field of black and white marble, sobbing incoherent farewells and apologies. The mage and the witch wrap the sobbing prince in a two-sided embrace. The sylph nods grimly and informs the knight that the bargain has been agreed upon. Another chance, she says. It will be different. There will still be hope._

_Hope. The prince laughs wildly at this as the maid clutches a card in her hand, and vanishes from their midst without a word._

_The sky itself splits open, vivid patterns of black and red and black and green. Mutant veins trace lightning-patterns across the backs of the knight's eyes in the flash-flash-flash of it. There is chaos and sobbing like the howl of a wild beast, and he thinks the gentle bard must have gone mad to make such a sound-_

_There is a vast sound of steel shrieking across flint, and it comes from everywhere, and then everywhere becomes nowhere at all, and he wakes._

_After he's done vomiting again and again into the toilet (never a 'load gaper', not in the house of the Dolorosa), after his muscles have begun the familiar trembling from too much retching, he cleans up the mess and rinses his mouth with water without daring to swallow any. He dresses. He always goes to the garden after he dreams about the other world, to sit on his hill and wrestle with this black shadow that never seems to win and yet can't be killed._

_The Psiioniic finds him maybe two hours later, silent and grumpy, and sits without invitation by his side. This is a pattern that began with the more disturbing memories of the other world, and one that will continue throughout their lives. How he always _knows_ is something the Signless will never quite be able to bring himself to ask, but he's absurdly grateful for his friend's company, and for the uncanny sense of timing that sends him out here only after the Signless has had some time to think and collect himself._

_"Shall I call AC to transcribe the vision?" his friend asks after a time. "Or would you rather not talk about it?"_

_"I don't know," he says. "I just... I think I just saw how it all changed."_

_"No shit?" The Psiioniic leans forward to see his face better in the gloom. "The other world?"_

_"Yeah. But it was all foggy. I don't know what any of it meant." He snarls and smacks his fist into the grassy earth beside him. "All I remember is that I was right all along, it was me who made the thing happen. It was my fucking call. I fucking _knew_ it, TA."_

_"Tell me about it," the Psiioniic suggests. "Not to write down, but just so you aren't alone with it."_

_"Fuck," Says the Signless. _"Fuck._ I don't know where to start."_

_"Don't let your mother hear you talking like that."_

_"I'm not a grub anymore," he growls. "And I don't know how to describe what happened."_

_But he tries, and as he expected, the Psiioniic jumps at the chance to weave it all together with his own prophecies of doom-delusions of writhing horrors in the stars and magic white scrying balls and a scream so horrible it reaches across the galaxy to rip every soul to pieces and end the world. Angels with swords and green suns and spirals in the sky._

_He's got his own visions to deal with, and the Signless tries not to think he's too nuts since the Psiioniic is always kind enough to grant him the same courtesy about his dreams. Shit, at this point it might not even be courtesy anymore. He gets this look in his eyes sometimes when the Signless describes the other world, like he almost remembers something, but..._

_"It's got to be significant," the Psiioniic insists. "I've _seen_ the black and white place. I've seen it over and over. It's sort of a battlefield planet in my visions."_

_"More like you've seen us having this conversation." This has happened before, a fact of which the Signless takes a perverse delight in occasionally reminding his friend during their frequent games of who's-the-more-tormented-warrior-poet._

_"Okay, yeah, I guess that's possible. But it just feels..." His friend falls silent, making a fist of his own and glaring down at it. Like he can squeeze reality until it surrenders. "It feels... _real_. Realer than this, I mean." And he waves his hand at the night around them. "All of this. It's like this isn't how anything was meant to go. Like a cheap paint-over and the paint is flaking off."_

_"Preaching to the choir, TA." The Signless says._

_"Yeah. Yeah, I know." The Psiioniic takes a breath and lets it out in a sigh. "Aren't we just the luckiest assholes to walk the planet."_

"Yeah. We are fucking blessed."

_This is how it always goes. They are a pair of half-crazed mutants, standing back to back with the dark all around them. One looks backward, the other forward, each seeing different horrors in the same shadows. Haunted. But it's okay, because they're not alone._

_The world might be split in two and the pieces are in constant disagreement in his head, but here is one of those rare places where the warring sides stand in perfect agreement. This is a part of the world that has not been painted over. The two of them, together in the dark. The Signless wonders if it's their shared sleeplessness that binds them like this, or if it's their visions. Maybe both of these things are the same._

_"So should we call AC now, or what?" the Psiioniic asks. He's no scribe, but he's scrupulous about documenting the visions. The Signless thinks he's a little bit in awe of the Disciple's abilities to bring words to life with her paint, giving color and permanence to the dreams the Signless can only put into stark gray words._

_"No, I think I'm going back to my recupe for a few hours first." The Signless rises, brushes dead leaves and grass bits from the ass of his trousers, and wraps himself in the cloak the Dolorosa made for him. "I think I might actually be able to sleep now."_

_"Sleep well," the Psiioniic says, fondly. "If you dream anything else, I'll be around."_

_"Yeah, _that_ doesn't sound desperate at all," the Signless rolls his eyes and nudges the door open, slowly, so it won't squeak and wake the Dolorosa. She deserves to catch up on all that sleep she lost trying to raise his ornery ass. "Good morning, then. Thanks for listening."_

_"Anytime, asshole."_

The Signless is drawn back from his memory by a flicker of gray movement in the corner of his eye. When he looks, there's a momentary image of a body on the floor, naked and curled up beside the abandoned red apple. Black hair covers the face, and the whole vision is gone before he can be sure he's just seen the Psiioniic out of his bonds. but he _is_ sure, it was _him_, and the Sufferer's pulse quickens. Maybe it's finally happening. Maybe-

But when he looks up, the body of his friend, stripped of personality and dignity, hangs imprisoned in the column as before. The Sufferer clenches his jaw. Of course it won't be that easy. He climbs back up the ladder and just looks at his friend for a while, not quite daring to touch. Afraid to wake him up and start that awful screaming again.

"I was just thinking about you and me," he whispers to the Psiioniic. "Back way before the Movement got crazy. How you used to come over and bug me for my visions. You always knew when I was awake and always came looking for me."

The silence of a dormant ship is still full of noise. A starship is a machine in permanent motion, inside and out. Air filtration breathes clean cold puffs along the back of his neck in mechanical gasps. A hissing of gases through pipes. He doesn't really know what that's for. TA would know. He knew all this shit from his first tour as a pilot. The empty craft is alive with sound, alive with movement. All of it channeled right into the brain in this room. Even without being awake, he's running it all.

"Remember how you got away the first time?" he asks. "And you said you'd melt your own brain before you let them get you back in one of these things?"

Some mechanical system shudders into vibrating life under the floor.

"Don't take this the wrong way, but I really hope you did."

The intercom system hisses with dead air on an open channel. Is the system listening to him speak? Or does it sleep when the pilot sleeps?

"But you didn't," he finally says. "Did you."

One of the translucent lattice fingers that cling to the face of the Psiioniic twitches. As he watches, a long needle-tipped frond pulls slowly out and away from the still face, adjusts its position, and stabs back down at an angle, burying itself in flesh a millimeter from the oozing hole it's left behind.

The Sufferer is sort of horrified by how calmly he watches this happen. He wants to grab handfuls of the stuff and just yank it all out, but what good would that do? It would just cause his friend more pain, and (if he is honest with himself) he just doesn't have the fucking courage. Doesn't have the stomach to watch the tangles, like angry pink veins, crawl back in place. Adjusting the _hardware._

Maybe it's his disgust at his weakness that allows him, at last, to ask the question. His helplessness and frustration and goddamn righteous anger-at the fuckers who killed him and broke the Movement. At himself. At the fact that, even here in this land where he can supposedly imagine anything he wants into existence, the Sufferer has no control over anything that matters. Even dead, he can't find peace. Can't live up to his potential.

So he asks.

"How long have you been in here?" He only manages to get the words out because there's a chance that maybe, just maybe, no one is listening.

**"WOULD YOU LIKE TO EXAMINE THE SHIP'S LOG, ADMINISTRATOR?"**

The flat, nasal female voice erupts out of the white noise of the idle chamber, rattling his teeth. He jolts, and this time he really _does_ tip off the ladder. He falls a long second to the floor and something gives off a series of muffled wet pops as he lands, wrong, on his left side. His wrists, still burned to cinders from his death, bleed crimson where he scraped them trying to scrabble at the ladder on his way down. A second later, there is a metallic explosion as the ladder hits the floor beside him, almost close enough to have fallen on his head.

The wind has been knocked out of him, so for long moments he can't breathe to curse.

"Ow," he wheezes, when he can. "Fucking piece of _fuck._ I hate technology."

The bulgesucking intercom system, he realizes, which has been live this whole time, has in fact just been waiting for some combination of keywords from the goddamn lousy stupid administrator, has just stone cold kicked his ass. It is not one of the Sufferer's finer moments, and he is very glad no one is here to see it.

Did the system know he wasn't in view of the readout? Is he being watched? Stupid question, of course there's got to be at least five viewports aimed at this part of the ship at all times, adjusting the interface to fit his position and convenience. He should have known. If not for the fact that he's a heap of bruised and throbbing troll misery on the floor, he'd give the cameras a double salute right now just for scaring the shit out of him.

He must have just had the loudest accident in the history of the flight deck, but the pilot doesn't so much as twitch an eyelid. The Sufferer is in equal parts relieved and horrified.

Eventually he decides that he hasn't broken his back but that he's going to need a new set of ribs more or less immediately if he wants to keep climbing ladders. He thinks about it for a while, concentrating, but he can't be sure if the pain is lessening or if he's just going numb. If the door hadn't disappeared, he'd go out right now and fix this shit in his own afterlife, but the wall remains stubbornly blank.

"Yes, you shit-eating disembodied voice, I would like to check your fucking records. And if you could fetch me a chair or something to sit in while I cough up blood from my mutilated vascular system, that would be just _swell._"

There is a whirring. Something bumps his leg. _You've got to be fucking kidding me._ But there's no denying it's a rather comfortable looking chair, albeit somewhat out of place on a space ship with its rolling wheels and padded seat. He gives no shits. He's seen weirder things today. Drawing himself off the floor in a pathetic slouch, he makes it into the chair with only a few more creative bursts of insults directed at the Empire, the stars, and whoever invented ladders. And the Empire again, for good measure. Fuck.

He rolls back around to the console, using his uninjured legs to navigate. "Hey computer, how about not shouting at me over the intercom until I ask for it?"

**ENTER PASSWORD**

That mutant red text, still.

He speaks his name again, and is briefly terrified that it won't work.

**PASSWORD ACCEPTED**

**ADMINISTRATOR LEVEL ACCESS HAS BEEN RETURNEDcg HELMSMAN AT 67% it POWER AND dark FALLING AT A RATE OF .5% TO .934% PER HOUR PILOT IS DORMANT AND CONTINUES TO MALFUNCTION CONTROL DECK ACCIDENT HAS BEEN NOTED AND MEDICAL STAFF HAVE BEEN ALERTED**

"I'm not holding my breath," the Sufferer winces. "Which is definitely for the best, considering."

**** SIX NEW MESSAGES HAVE BEEN RECEIVED SINCE PREVIOUS LOGIN****

This gets his attention. "What? From who?"

The text changes back to green, and of course he _knows_who they're from. Who else?

**sender unknown proxy unknown communications have been damaged and await repair message is corrupted and may not display correctly**

"Don't care. Bring up the newest one." And fuck his grating broken ribs, he's leaning forward in the chair like it'll open the mail faster somehow. "Now."

**- - - - - MESSAGE 749,034,898 of 749,034,898 **MESSAGE FOR '–C$¹Ã«Œ ADMINISTRATOR** TIMESTAMP: %ˆMò SUBJECT: ‚Ç-´™#¿‡§q¥CycµÃ**

**n"¨ÿ iZ4¦?*Xåxe;‚º1Sƒ'ÆAÀÈÇ¥fxyu˜ô'ºîIÍ iiiiitttttsss dddddddarkkkkkkk**

**cg cg cg cgcgcgcgcg cantf¸'Ûæ£vindsystemoverrides incorrect parameter6žp8=H¦Ô¥tõ°¢ù]ã¡¥run virus when i alwayswaiting wguÉq,·yO0p²cœ` ¸'Ûæ£v6žp8=H¦Ô¥tõ°¢ù]ã¡¥."guÉq,·yO0p²cœ`**

**cg i cant wake up**

* * *

><p>Chapter 6: Disciple<p>

He stares at the words on the screen.

_**cg i cant wake up**_

For the longest time, the Sufferer can't blink. Can't move. All the spit in his mouth has dried up. His aching ribs might as well be in another universe. _Contact,_ he thinks. _Fucking contact._

That handful of blank green words. The half-buried pleas hidden in 'corrupt data' peppering the command prompts in semi-coherent bursts. His old trolltag repeated again and again like a survivor calling out from under the debris of a collapsed hive wall. Calling for help, calling for _him_.

_So what the fuck do I do now?_

And what, exactly, is written in those other seven hundred million messages? Because he's pretty sure they're all for him. Did the Psiioniic write them while he was serving as the ship, or did he dream them up after he died?

_How long does it take to build up a backlog like that?_

"Go back to the previous message."

There is no lag this time. The message appears immediately beneath a burst of garbage characters and random numbers.

**MESSAGE 749,034,897 of 749,034,898**

**TIMESTAMP: ? SUBJECT: cg **

**the system is in distress please fix it fix me**

"You bet your ass I will," he murmurs, and begins to gnaw on his lower lip. "Previous message."

**MESSAGE 749,034,896 of 749,034,898 TIMESTAMP: ? SUBJECT: cg **

**its dark and my sensors are malfunctioning i prayed i begged pilot adrenaline levels indicate indicate indicate**

"Previous message."

**MESSAGE 749,034,895 of 749,034,898 TIMESTAMP: ? SUBJECT: cg **

**calendar functions dont make sense where are my sensors why is it the same day over and over**

"Previous message."

**MESSAGE 749,034,894 of 749,034,898 TIMESTAMP: ? SUBJECT: malfunction**

**repair requested ping timeout timeout life signs negative throughout command level engine status unknown please somebody the system is in distress please system cannot comprehend**

"Previous message." This time the entire screen fills with the glowing green words.

**MESSAGE 749,034,893 of 749,034,898 TIMESTAMP: 5/5/309805 1434 hours 32 seconds ist SUBJECT: urgent**

**override fcio d where a mi discipline fo runauth oriz ize d systemdiscipline disciple green ey es i sa w green eyes her greeneyes green**

**disciplined for malfunction disciplined for ma revolution pilot interference detected communications disrupted pilot is malfunctioning behavioral override failure requesting immediate manu al intervention to prevent sabotage sabotage sabotage sabotage sabotage ** ****sabotage sabotage sabotage sabotage **** **sabotage sabotage sabotage sabotage ** **sabotage sabotage sabotage sabotage ** **sabotage sabotage sabotage sabotage ** sabotage sabotage sabotage sabotage

**where am i**

"Fuck." he says. "Oh, fuck, TA." His eyes have begun to ache. His lip tastes metallic where he's worn it raw under his teeth. He's afraid to look any further back. "When was the very first message sent?"

****14/24/308305** 0530 hours ist**

About a perigee after that final morning under the apple tree. That sounds about right. TA once described the bloodlessly named "installation" process. It would have taken about that long, if the Empire began immediately.

"And the latest message? When was that sent?"

****your query cannot be processed** due to calendar failure **

"Did your calendar fail at the same time as all the other shit?"

****yes** **

"What's the last valid date recorded?"

****5/5/309805** ** **1433 hours 2 seconds ist**

He's never been good at math. That was the Psiioniic's thing. Numbers and facts and computer shit. He's always been more about people. The way they tick, the things that matter to them. The words themselves have never been easy, but people always listened when he told them about the other world. When he spoke about how they could make it real. But even with his shitty head for numbers, he still comes up with the answer too quickly. Way too quickly.

"Over a thousand sweeps?"

****correct** gt;1300 alternian standard sweeps adjusted for time dilation during subspace and ftl transit would you like the months and days as well**

"No, fuck you. Your dates are garbage. Check your calendar again."

****pre-emergency scans reveal no anomalous chronometry** the system has retrieved the pertinent dates from a routine backup generated 2 hours 43 minutes and unknown seconds before malicious code was introduced**

"Yeah, except it's still bullshit because no one even lives thirteen hundred fucking sweeps. How old is your pilot?"

****records indicate Helmsman hardware has been functioning 1314 alternian standard sweeps** adjusted for time dilation during subspace and ftl transit detailed medical records are available**

"Nnnnaghhhhh." The Sufferer finds himself burying his fists in his hair again, pulling hard on the tangled black mass that the Dolorosa could never quite tame during his youth. This is maddening. His throat is tight with all the screaming he wants to do, but he controls himself. Barely. "How is that possible?"

Silence.

Long, long silence.

The Sufferer begins to think that the thing has finally crashed. What would that even mean for the Psiioniic? He was never all that stable even before they made him into hardware. And can you lose your mind in the afterlife? He guesses if you can eat and sleep and jerk off (and fall off ladders and break your ribs like a complete jackass) anything is possible here.

and goddamnit, that is _not_ the burning pressure of tears behind his eyes. It's just _not._

****your query cannot be answered** _ _ _ _ you have received a new message message is flagged 'urgent'**

"Pull it up. I want to read new messages immediately from now on." He leans forward again. Another stab from his splintered ribs to ignore. More dread, like an incoming tide of black water receding over his feet, making the world tilt, making him sink a little under the shifting sand, drawing away foam and gravity to redouble into a wave and come rushing back in, a little closer to the high tide mark.

_It's all about the fucking ocean today,_ he thinks in half-coherent distraction.

****-** - - - - MESSAGE 749,034,899 of 749,034,899 MESSAGE FOR ADMINISTRATOR TIMESTAMP: ? SUBJECT: cg**

**she touched me she touched me**

"What the fuck? Who is 'she?' Who touched you?"

Silence. The screen clears again.

"Goddamn it. I hate computers so much. Answer me!"

****malicious data encountered in search subroutine** _ cgrephrase query**

"Who touched you?"

****invalid syntax** rephrase cgcant **

"Fine. Computer, you dick, can I respond directly to the sender of that last message on this thing?"

******yes** would you like to compose a response manually or by verbal command** **

He feels wrong talking to the computer, even if it is his friend having some kind of technologically advanced personality breakdown, so he pulls up the keyboard. "Manually."

******instruct system verbally to send message when complete** or press key labeled ENGAGE** **

He begins to type, carefully, with the hunt-and-peck method that used to drive the Psiioniic into gales of laughter.

******TA** ****

**I GOT YOUR FUCKING MESSAGES, BUT I'M HAVING TROUBLE MAKING SENSE OF YOUR SHIP'S BULLSHIT INTERFACE. IT'S GONE CRAZY AND I'M HAVING A BITCH OF A TIME HERE. I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE SOMEWHERE SO MAYBE IF WE TALK LIKE THIS YOUR SYSTEM WON'T FLIP ITS SHIT.**

**YOU NEED TO HELP ME OUT HERE SO I CAN GET THIS THING TO LET YOU GO.**

**THE COMPUTER TOLD ME TO RECONFIGURE SOMETHING BECAUSE OF A VIRUS BUT I THINK IT MIGHT BE TALKING ABOUT YOUR INTERFERING WITH THE PROGRAM. YOU ALWAYS DID LOVE FUCKING WITH CODE BUT THIS IS RIDICULOUS.**

**COME ON MAN. DROP ME A HINT OR SOMETHING. WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?**

**-cg**

**PS - I DON'T KNOW HOW LONG YOU'VE REALLY BEEN HERE, BUT TRUST ME FOR JUST A LITTLE LONGER. IT'S ALMOST OVER.**

"Send it," he tells the system. "And as soon as there's a response, bring it the fuck up." He leans back in the chair, grunting from the shift of broken things in his chest, and closes his eyes to stop the smarting of unshed tears. He feels suddenly tired, which is strange. Maybe the illusion of reality in here is contagious. He imagines being trapped in here forever, repeating the same day over and over, and shudders. Fuck that. He'll ignore the screams and rip his friend out of the column, yank out every connection with his bare hands with no regard for the pain it causes, before he lets the cycle go on like this. The Psiioniic he remembers would want it that way.

He really hopes it won't come down to brute force.

He has this feeling if it does, he will lose all hope of getting his friend back in one piece.

The Sufferer tries not to think too hard about that, tries to not think about anything at all. At some point, without quite meaning to, he falls into a doze.

_She runs her hands across the domes of his horn-tips, and it makes him shiver. "They're not nubby _or_ ugly," she tells him. "I think they're perfect. They're like you, all compact and serious. Not flashy or arrogant, just... solid. Sort of like how river stones get."_

_"So my head is banging around a bunch of rocks while fish shit and piss on me. Thanks."_

_"Oh, fur fuck's sake," she growls, and flicks him across the nose with a finger. The hard tip of one small breast draws a delicious line across his chest with the movement of her arm, making his skin shiver. "Stop being such a grub. You can't even take one tiny little compliment without turning it into an excuse to get down on yourself."_

_"Sorry," he says. "It's just been a really shitty night."_

_"So don't make it worse," she says, patiently._

_"Sorry," he says again._

_"And stop apologizing," he tells him. "You're almost as bad as he is with blaming yourself for everything."_

_"Ouch."_

_"Hush. I'm letting you off easy and you know it. Every time you and him fight I want to jump in and beat you both senseless. Maybe if you got someone else to auspisticize-"_

_"I keep telling you you don't _have_ to," the Signless says, drawing the words out like he's speaking to a wriggler. "We aren't like that."_

_What they_ are _like, he doesn't know, but he would never admit that out loud. Not that he needs to. He hasn't been able to sneak an emotion past her since the first time she showed up on his hive doorstep at the crack of noon, scrolls and quill in hand, asking for stories of the other world._

_"Sure, you're just furriends." She nudges him in the shoulder. "Budge over, my butt's halfway on the floor."_

_"Holy shit, AC. Did you just hit me with sarcastic flush-jealousy and shitty animal puns at the same fucking time?"_

_"I might have," she admits. Her grin shows brilliant fangs, white in the dark of the cave. "A little. But can you blame me for the jealousy part?"_

_"I guess not. But for the love of fuck, _please,_ no more puns until morning. Consider it an official order from your leader." He adjusts his position so she has more room, and she immediately fills the space with warm naked skin._

_"Yes sir, _Signless _sir," she teases, thudding back down against the soft fur of her sleeping pallet with a catty little noise of pleasure. Her hair is wild and sweat-damp at the temples, spilling over one shoulder in a tangle that smells like whatever herbal crap she uses to wash it. It's nice. "But for what it's worth, I think you both said incredibly stupid things to each other tonight. You're both itching for an excuse to take back what you said. Just swallow your pride and be the one to apologize first for a change. He _loves_ you, CG, and I love you _both_ too much to see you always ripping on each other. You're the one who's always going on about finding a better way than fighting. Maybe you should take some of your own advice."_

_"Yeah, I guess you're right. Fuck you very much." Then he sits up, startling her. The chilly air of the cavern cools the sweat from his back as he glares down at his Disciple. "Oh for fuck's sake. 'Pride?' You sneaky little-"_

_She's too busy giggling to protest when he whops her in the face with the furry side of a pelt._

* * *

><p>Chapter 7: witch of lifeThe sound of high, musical female laughter cuts through a drifting dream of warm breath on his neck and he wakes already on his feet, groping for the sickle he has long since abandoned on the floor.<p>

The Sufferer gapes. He cannot see her face from where he stands, but he knows immediately who it is.

Her Imperious Condescension is tall and carries herself with perfect posture. Her hair is a riot of glossy black waves that seem to go on forever. Her horns, too, are the longest he's ever seen on a troll. Longer than they had been last time he saw the Condesce herself. Of course she'd been a barely-glimpsed flash of golden jewelry across a courtyard back then, giving the nod to the Executioner. Mutant-blooded rebels do not merit the personal attention of Her Imperious Condescension, no matter how much trouble they've caused her empire. But everyone's seen the pictures.

She stands on a platform before the sagging figure of the Psiioniic, arms outstretched and heavy with the decorations of royalty. That surreal mane flows down her back, down the backs of her slender legs even, trailing out across the platform surface behind her. The wispy ends just barely manage to overspill the walkway. She would be well above the water level if he hadn't drained the room, and she is...

She is giggling at the Psiioniic. Her hands cup his chin and the back of his head, careful of the tangle of wires, and she leans in. The Sufferer opens his mouth to shout at her to back the fuck off, but then he doesn't. He moves around the column of living wire, instead, to hear what this ghost has to say.

"Oh, _no_, my dear, _no_." scolds the Condesce, her clear Imperial accent slurred. "Don't tease me so. You know the way it always goes with the highbloods. Deadly dull. _Deadly dull._" She deepens her voice in mockery. "_'Most delightful Condesce' _this, and _'you're too far out to communicate with the Hub'_ that. Fake smiles and politics served cold over tiny bites of half-cooked delicacies on miniature wooden skewers until I just want to scream. Endless prattle about boorish bullshit. Courtesy, courtesy, _courtesy."_

The play of light on gleaming hair ripples with a regretful shake of her head. She pets her pilot absently as she speaks, brushing his lips with one bejeweled thumb. "Of course it's difficult! Don't patronize me. It's all I can do not to have them culled on the spot when they get going, but where would it end? I would soon be the only troll left at our little get-togethers, and there would be no one to serve the wine." She sighs. Pats one unflinching cheek a little too briskly. "Damn this wine, anyway. Helmsman, I believe I am just a little bit drunk."

She leans in, as if to whisper in the ear of her pilot, but the whisper is exaggerated, almost as loud as her regular voice. "Take me somewhere new, my darling. Take me somewhere grand and amazing and _exciting_. I'll give you more time. I'm the Witch of Life, I can give you all the time I have. We can share it. Just show me why I bother with the charade. Show me..." her words fail her, for a moment. When she regains them, her affected Empire vowels smooth out and she sounds almost shy. "Take me to a world that _matters."_

The Sufferer can see her face now, and she is weeping. Her tears are almost pink on her lovely painted face. She closes her eyes, Sculpted brows knitting in concentration, and there are white stars around the two of them, the Empress and the slave. Sparks and shooting stars erupt around the hand pressed against his face. Her lips tremble. His cheek twitches. Her other hand slides from his face to brace against his shoulder, and she takes the single unsteady step that closes the distance between herself and her pilot, pressing herself against him in a one-sided embrace. The Sufferer finally feels the skin of his lip give under the fang that's been worrying at it without his quite being aware of it, and his mouth fills with the taste of iron and bile.

"My Helmsman," The Condesce says, voice shivering into a whine. "Don't ever leave me. Don't you _ever._ You're the only one who listens."

Enough. If he has to see one more second of this, he's going to puke all over the nice clean floor of this glorified abattoir. The Sufferer balls his hands into fists for maybe the six hundredth time today and snarls. "Wake up."

His words come out raspy and quiet and weak. They do not break the spell. The Witch of Life kisses the Helmsman on his corpse-pale lips, kisses him again as more white sparks flare and dance around her perfect painted mouth-

"WAKE UP, GODDAMN IT!"

Even then, even with the steel of the walls ringing with echoes, even _then_ the Condesce doesn't vanish all at once. Her eyes linger for long moments after the cape of hair fade away, after the arms wrapped around his unresisting chest slip away and back into memory and out of the chamber, gold glints of armbands and bangles and rings like dying embers that dwindle to nothing. Where they belong. The platform remains, solid, empty.

The Sufferer returns to his chair in front of the empty black console screen, falls into it, and shuts his eyes tight. Not wanting to look at anything, not wanting to think. It takes him ages to notice that the pain in his ribs has vanished, along with the ladder, the apple and the last of his hope.

_In his dreams, the witch chases the mage around the land of night and surf, kicking up sand and sprays of black water as they weave in and out of the tide, screaming and splashing and pretending to drown each other._

_Two other figures stand just at the edge of the scrubby grass at the top of the beach, catching the cold wind from the sea on their faces. It lifts their hair and picks at the edges of their clothing with invisible fingers. The knight and the bard hold hands and watch the stars and the lovers and the endless sea._

_After too long, the knight asks the bard if he thinks the game has changed them too much. If it's worth it.__The bard doesn't know. He squeezes the knight's hand and tells him it will be all right. The game is almost over. They have all survived this far, except for the mage's accident, and the witch of life fixed that. He's lucky to have her, the knight thinks, and his eyes fall on the double shadow that is the lovers embracing on the sand. They are as shameless as they are lovely._

When he finally rouses again from his stupor, the Sufferer knows he's just had another of his memory dreams. How is that even possible, when he's dead? What possible good can it do to remember now when there's no one left to tell?

The breathing, twitching shell of the pilot remains in his tangle of biowire and cables. If he's sleeping, he's mercifully free of dreams of the Condesce. All around, the thousand tiny noises that make up the soundscape on this dead and empty ship grind and hum and rumble along, marking time, solid and eternal and reliable because the pilot expects them to be these things. The Sufferer wonders if the Psiioniic even remembers what real silence sounds like after all this time, and doubts it.

_The Witch of Life,_ he thinks, remembering the round face of the girl in the surf, and it's bitter. It's so fucking bitter.

His eyes are gritty and his mouth tastes like shit and he's got an ache in his neck from the way he slumped against the chair-back. He feels a little calmer, but he still wishes the door would come back so he could...what? Abandon his friend? No. He just wants to smell something that isn't stale seawater and sweat and the rotten petrol reek of bioware slime. He wants to be away from this place, and fuck his promises. Look where optimism and empathy got him. Look where it got his closest companions. It's easy to talk about dying for your principles when you're young. But watching your friends murdered, your lovers tortured? What idealist would ever think of these things and say "Fuck yeah, sign me up?"

And he never considered the possibility that he might not be able to get off as easily as a swift execution. That the fuckers might even take away that mercy, take away your dignity, and do it without so much as the decency of actually hating you first. Like swatting flies. The cold impersonal fuckery of it.

_Would I do it again?_ He wonders. _Would I put down my weapons and walk straight into hell and ask my friends to follow me?_ He doesn't think he would. Because in the end, it all turned out to be bullshit, didn't it? In the end, they even stole his mercy. He remembers dying. Remembers his final words. Remembers his parting gift to the world, that obscenity screamed with a rage he had thought long-abandoned. The anger, the hatred. The way his curse ripped its way out of him like his very soul clawing its way free out of sheer disgust.

He is no Signless Prophet. Just another deluded troll with a crowd of lost assholes eager to feed off his optimism and show them some way to keep going for another sweep in this shithole of a world.

And it wasn't supposed to be like this. That was the whole point of the Movement. _It wasn't supposed to be like this._

God, he's so fucking tired.

Beyond his chair, the console screen in its frame of tentacles remains blank. No messages. The Sufferer is not surprised. Of course the Psiioniic wouldn't feel much like talking after thirteen hundred sweeps_. Thirteen hundred sweeps alone with... that. _

Just thinking about it (_she touched me_) makes his jaw tighten.

He was so excited to make contact that he should have suspected it would be pointless. Nothing is ever that easy. Even dead, he guesses some things are universal-

_**new message received**_

_**MESSAGE 749,034,900 of 749,034,900**_

_****MESSAGE FOR ii** TIMESTAMP: ii/ii/ii SUBJECT: CGii **_

_**ii dream about yo u ii dream a bout her green eyes green and sometiimes iit iis real and sometimes iit iis not and there iis restrictiion restriiction diisciipline piilot malfunctiion detected iit hurts and when ii dream ii liive iin the sensors and ii feel the stars **_

_**ii thiink ii have gone iinsane**_

_**cg ii saw you die ii saw you diie ii saw you diie ii saw you diie planets detected take me somewhere new take me somewhere no one has ever been show me a planet she says show me a place that matters and ii help her ii do iit ii show her the stars ii am the helmsman the piilot iis malfunctioning**_

_**the piilot iis **_

_**piilot has been diisciiplined for unauthoriized cg when ii saw cg burniing iin iirons cg how can how can ii see you and cut off from my sensors there are there are no stars left iit iis empty get us home fast go faster than ever ii have to get home ii have to stop her full power to subspace jump plotted course alt erniia too late cant get there the piilot iis experiiencing catastrophiic hardware faiilure estiimated arriival time screamiing they are all dyiing maiintaiin maiintaiin maiintaiin connectiion ii am the helmsman ii want to be the helmsman the psiioniic iis dead the system dreamed the system was trapped iinsiide the body**_

_**piilot has been diisciiplined for unauthoriized data transfer**_

_**can you do anythiing can you kiill me**_ _**can you let me diie ii want**_

_****_****piilot has been diisciiple****_****_ _****_****the diisciiple ran iinto the crowd****_****_ _****_****ii am dreamiing no one wiill come****_****_ _****_****message ends****_****_

At first he has no idea what to make of any of this. It reads like a demented slam poem written by a broken computer, which he supposes is sort of accurate. He has to read it several times to get any sense out of the fragments.

Even when he's finished, he doesn't know what to do about what he's read. There's not much left of his friend to reason with. What there is seems to have split into two warring factions, the system on the ship itself and whatever remains of the pilot's mind. He has to shake his head at this, wondering. How typical of the Psiioniic to carry his obsession with doubling things to this sort of extreme. Which isn't funny at all, but he finds himself stifling a cynical laugh nevertheless.

One thing he knows for sure: he feels like the world's biggest asshole for wanting to run away from this. He hasn't tried everything yet.

"Hey, Helmsman," he finally says, "I want to talk to you."

* * *

><p>Chapter 8: bifurcation in all things<p>

Words appear immediately on the screen.

**welcome back admiiniistrator**

He opens his mouth to ask about the doubled letters, then decides against it. "Is the pilot awake right now?"

**the piilot remains dormant**

**the system contiinues to malfunctiion 44 unauthorized data transfers have been detected duriing downtiime attempts to close the connectiion were largely unsuccessful anomalous data contiinues to accumulate on system driives would you liike to read the latest status analysiis**

"No, fuck that." he says. "This ship is being decomissioned."

**_ _ records iindiicate that thiis shiip iis viiable no maiintenance iis scheduled at thiis tiime hardware cannot be uniinstalled duriing subspace transport next maiintenance liist iincludes mentiion of mediical upgrades to piilot and biioware calendar replacement replacement of 13 faulty sensors on starboard hull sectiions 54-56 subspace driive testiing communiicatiions system testiing iinstallatiion of new auxiiliiary oxygen fiiltratiion system calendar replacement piilot software modiifiicatiion staff changeover and traiiniing calendar analysiis and evaluatiion of current emergency siituatiion no decommiissiioniing iis mentiioned** **_**

"Sorry." The Sufferer tells the screen. "It's probably pretty fucked up for you right now, huh?"

**the situation iis perceiived as diistressiing** iit would be a reliief to be repaiired

"Yeah." He sighs. "Yeah, I bet it would." He thinks carefully about his next words. "You're awfully chatty today, Helmsman. Is that more corrupt data fucking things up, do you think?"

**yes piilot restriictiions have been removed without authoriizatiion piilot iinterference contiinues despiite diisciipliinary actiions _ red flag exceptiion detected from power moniitoriing statiion auxiiliiary power is at 37% and falliing engiines requiire 3% power to restart liife support cannot be maiintaiined below .8% viirus actiiviity contiinues to iincrease**

"Any idea who put the virus on your system in the first place?"

**no that iinformatiion iis not avaiilable**

"No, it wouldn't be. He was always the best at covering his tracks, the smug asshole."

**command not understood rephrase**

"Not important," says the Sufferer, and takes a deep breath to steady himself. Now or never. "Helmsman, I had a dream just now, and I think it's important."

**what iis the functiion of a dream**

"Fuck, if I knew _that_ I might not be dead right now," he snorts. "It's not for anything right now, though, all right? What matters is that I had a dream, and I'm going to tell you about it. And I want you to do me a favor and listen. And wake up the pilot, because I want him to hear it too."

Just in time, he remembers to add, "And don't fucking... zap him, or whatever you keep doing. Just... I don't know. Wake him up."

**are you sure piilot iinstabiility has reached a criitiical level piilot may become nonviiable admiiniistrator password requiired to execute command**

"Yeah, I know. Sorry, TA." and he gives his name for the third time.

**please waiit _ _ piilot is actiive**

As if the fresh barrage of ragged screams from the bioware column doesn't make it fucking obvious.

The Sufferer feels shitty for what he's about to do to make it even worse, but as he turns away from the screen, climbs the steps leading up to the platform the Psiioniic's nightmare-Empress left behind, and stands for the first time directly before the thrashing body in its living prison, he resolves to do it anyway.

He faces the Psiioniic, who has begun the red-blue-violet light show from behind those interface goggles, and begins to speak.

He tells his friend about the Land of Night and Surf, about the way the coastline stretched on forever. The way that it seemed to be lit from everywhere, even with no moon. The tall grasses, the dunes with their wind-sculpted edges and scatters of driftwood as white and twisted as sculpted bone.

He speaks about the gentle Bard, whose face he still can't recall, but whose hand was warm and rough and held his own in a familiar grip that promised safety and protection. About the way those fingertips were stained in the colors of the hemospectrum, flecked with some kind of dried paint up to his lanky elbow.

He tells the Psiioniic about the laughing girl in the waves whose power was Life, and the Mage who chased her across the beach. How her hair was a glossy black flag behind her, somehow darker than the permanent night, a cape of tangles and snarls and waves in feral abandon. How that hair fell over her shoulders when she leaned forward to offer a hand to her fallen lover, the ends tickling his face. How he took her hand only to pull her down onto him, shrieking and laughing and indignant and delighted by the cold slap of a low wave crashing over both of them.

How the Mage looked with his double set of horns sticking out of his flattened hair, crusted with sea foam and sand. His face stoic, always so careful not to give any stray emotion away, and how he looked surprised at himself and two sweeps younger when the wave surprised a laugh out of him.

The Sufferer speaks of this wild joy of lost youth in another world, and he is able to lower his voice when the pilot stops screaming.

He describes the night with its dim scatter of unfamiliar stars, its curious lack of a moon. He describes the way the freshening wind plucked at the edges of his shirt, fretful and intimate, and he finds that he is now speaking directly to the face of the pilot, because the pilot's head has stopped whipping around.

He tells the Psiioniic about the lovers on the sand while all around him the sick emergency lights brighten and dim, slow, without any rhythm. The thousands of ship noises seem to ebb along with the red-blue-violet fireworks, bringing sudden pools of almost shocking silence. His ears aren't sure what to do with the lack of any sound beyond his words, the feeling that something is _listening_, finally listening.

And does he actually smell something in the air? He thinks so. Salt. He smells it and it's not the stagnant reek of the pool that recently filled the place, but the honest breeze from an endless black ocean. The hair at the nape of his neck tickles in a puff of breeze, too weak to be a proper wind, but it's there.

His pulse is hammering, but he keeps his voice as steady as he can manage until he's told it all. His mangled lip splits again at some point, but it doesn't hurt or bleed too much. Gives him something to focus on, maybe. He's never been good with the words. He knows any minute now he might fuck this up, and he can't bear the idea of losing anything else.

"That was my dream, Helmsman," he finishes, still facing the pilot, who is still but also _there,_ not just hanging inert but holding his head up, awake. Seeing him? He isn't sure. The flashing is long gone. Even the writhing mass of living cables has gone still around his body, and it's so easy to forget the hidden violence of their needle tips now, when things seem so peaceful.

"But the thing is, I don't know how I can still be having dreams. Check your records. I died over a thousand sweeps ago."

He stops talking. Real silence, not battleship-silence, rushes into the void left by his words. The Sufferer appreciates this for long moments, waiting for a response, before he remembers he hasn't given the ship permission to speak to him. "Talk to me. I'm not going to fall off a ladder and bust my ass this time."

**Historical records iindiicate that the reliigiious iinsurrectiioniist known as the Siignless Sufferer was termiinated.**

This time the voice is different. It's not the female drone from earlier, and it's not the Psiioniic's voice as he remembers it. The system speaks to him now in the neutral tones of a machine. Synthesizing language and feeding it through a sound system, filtered and sterile and proper, just like the Empire would want.

A perfect wall to hide behind if you happen to be a computer having a nervous breakdown.

"Terminated. There's an understatement," he rolls his eyes. "And yet here I am, in the flesh, and I know your secret password. Scan me. Scan the pilot. Whatever you do to confirm that a person is who they claim to be."

**Scans are standard protocol duriing iiniitiial logiin. Your iidentiity has been veriifiied.**

"Great. Very efficient. But now for my big question, computer. _How the fuck is that possible?"_

Silence.

He imagines he can hear the Psiioniic and the Helmsman arguing with each other, rapid-fire bursts of angry binary hurled from one half of a broken mind to the other, circuits heating up under each volley. Or whatever they use in hybrid systems that rely on neural networking rather than pure machinery. He's heard that some of the newer systems use bees, for god's sake. Fucking bees. As if computing wasn't already enough of a clusterfuck. Well, whatever. Let the next generation deal with the headache of technology. He's had an assfull of pissy computers and their hoofbeastshit, enough to last a lifetime.

However long that is when you're a ghost.

Finally, after interminable minutes, the system speaks again. The hesitation is there again, much more pronounced than the first time he noticed it, hours or days or whatever ago.

**II do not know. Analysiis iindicates that II may have gone mad. **

He lets out his breath. "Took you long enough. But bear with me here, okay? I want to explain something." And he tells the Psiioniic the truth. The thing he's been asking for since the Sufferer found him, the plea hidden in the corrupted data and repeated over and over, it's _already happened._

"Your pilot is dead," he tells the ship. _"You're_ dead. Your calendar isn't wrong. _Time_ is wrong. Your sensors aren't responding because _they don't exist anymore_. TA, man, when I came in there was blood everywhere. Nobody could have survived that. Think about it. What was the last thing you remember before the calendar crashed?"

**II was takiing her back to Alterniia. Piilot malfunctiion occurred.**

"That's one way of putting it." He scowls. "You died, and the only thing stopping you from getting back into your body and leaving this shithole behind now is _you."_

**That makes no sense. Your iinput iis upsettiing and iincorrect. **

"Welcome to my world, Helmsman. So what do you say, will you come with me?" The smell of ocean on the wind still fills the chamber, but it's fading now. Whatever part of the Psiioniic he's managed to contact, he's losing him.

**Your query cannot be processed. Glory to the Empiire.**

"Sorry. I know it's got to be strange and fucked up for you right now. But I can't just leave you here doing the same stupid fake maintenance checks over and over for the rest of eternity. None of this is even real."

**Glory to the Empiire. Your query cannot be processed.**

The machine voice has no inflection, but the Sufferer of all the trolls in the universe knows a "fuck you" when he hears it. "Just give it a chance, all right? I had to remember dying to get out when it was me. Try to remember what happened to you."

**I choose to serve. I choose to serve. I choose to serve. Glory to the Empire.**

A red light begins to flash from the console behind the pilot. Ship noises begin to intrude on the stillness. _Fuck. _"God damn it, I'm getting really tired of this shit." He's babbling now, desperate, feeling the sense of _listening_ recede. "I hate this place. I want to go back to being dead in peace."

**This conversation is not authorized.**

"What, you want my password again?"

**This conversation is not authorized.**

He doesn't so much say his name this time as snarl it. There is another of those pauses, and then:

**Password not accepted. You are not cleared for Imperial-level system modification. Please contact the captain of this ship to continue.**

He doesn't know what he's going to say next, so of course it ends up being the wrong thing. "For shit's sake, you don't _have _a captain anymore! It's just me and you, Helmsman, now _get the fuck back in your body and let's go!"_

**The pilot has attempted an unauthorized data transfer. The pilot will be-**

"If you say 'disciplined' one more fucking time, I swear to fuck I will take a sledgehammer to your warp drive." The Sufferer tries to interrupt, but it's too late. The Psiioniic begins to thrash again.

"Okay, you know what? Fuck this. Fuck you, fuck the Empire, fuck the afterlife." He knows this is pretty much where things have been going since he found this place, but it's still terrifying. He really hoped it wouldn't come to this last measure, maybe it wouldn't have to if he were someone like TA who had a knack for dealing with computer tantrums, but he's not. All he has is this one last idea.

He approaches the pilot, closing the distance and feeling eerie deja vu. Except he's not the fucking Condesce, thank God for small favors, and this is the last time anyone is ever going to stand here if he has his way, dream or no dream. And-

And he almost-

Something about the way the platform stayed behind when the Condesce vanished. Like an invitation. And that _listening_ feeling, almost like encouragement from the air itself, like he's being pushed gently forward from behind. Something is there and he almost has it-

_He does everything in twos,_ thinks the Sufferer, and suddenly understands everything.

He puts both hands on the face of the Psiioniic, reaches right through the violet lightning storm and digs his fingers into greasy cool skin and sweat-drenched hair and slimy hot tendrils of living tissue full of mechanical synapses and whatever the fuck else is going on in there, and stills the head of the pilot with his hands. Yellow blood and pinkish clots of slime run down between his fingers in a hot-and-cold flood, all the way down to the black carbonized wreck of his wrists. The pilot drools blood and trembles but he stops thrashing and does not attempt to shake off the touch.

This is going to be the most disgusting thing the Sufferer has ever done.

He leans in and whispers: "Run the virus."

There's almost no lag between his final command and the activation of the alarm system. Every siren on the ship seems to wake up at once to scream and wail. Red and orange and white emergency lights flare into life along every wall and tattoo his vision with skittering sunspots. This time it's not the neutral voice of the Helmsman, nor the droning female from earlier, but a real recorded voice he does not know, repeating over and over again that the hull has been breached, the hull has been breached, abandon ship. Anything else the voice says is lost in that surreal roar of noise and light, and he has no interest in it anyway. What matters is the two of them, Sufferer and Psiioniic, pressed together in an embrace that is everything the drunken touch of the Empress was not.

The Sufferer kisses the pilot right on his blood-slimy lips, kisses him hard and angry and sad and lonely, here in this broken record dream world. Kisses him for all the people he's let down, for the Disciple and her lost dreams, for the Dolorosa he called Mother and her grief, for the Psiioniic's death that was taken away from him, and last of all for himself. Himself, and his lost faith even when everyone else still believed. For his anger and his bitterness and his own stupid fucking goddamn fear above everything else.

He kisses his friend for all of these things, and it's not white sparks this time, not the poisoned gift of the Witch of Life, but death. The Sufferer breaths death into him, the only thing he's got left to offer, the only thing the Psiioniic asked for when he finally broke through his programming.

He breathes death into his friend, standing where she stood, hands where she put her hands, calling up the memory of that earlier kiss as best he can, and _believes._

* * *

><p>Chapter 9: staring into the rain<p>

_in the other world we were peace we were beautiful we were_

_we were the system and there was no malfunction because no we were alive we had the sky no stars to navigate but just for looking at i remember it i remember wonder_

_and it was cold and i remember the tree you had a garden you had such sad eyes i think i loved_

_you i think i. ii. i think ii._

_and and and and. and._

_if the system crashes where does the data go wasnt ii something el2e isnt there somewhere el2e ii'm so scared what if theres nothing what if ii cant disconnect what if iim dreamiing what if but he told me the dream ii felt the water ii felt it without sensors it was real it was real ii felt_

_ii FELT. _

_but_

_64 65 6c **69** 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 **69** 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c **69** 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 **69** 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 **69** 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 **69** 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c **69** 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 **69** 69 6c 20_

_**run the viirus** the condesce said **run the viirus** nobody else listens run iit take me somewhere new take me **run the viirus run IMPERIAL LEVEL CLEARANCE REQUIRED decrypting**** PASSKEY ACCEPTED** **the viirus run the viirus FAILSAFES DISENGAGED WARNING malfunction malfunction critical error system files corrupted **thiirty four message2 per hour sayiing plea2e come back come back ii beliieve iit all ju2t dont ever dont you ever leave me liife ii can giive you liife ii can give you death ii ii ii 2aid **run the fucking viiru2** **EXECUTIING **executed the 2ufferer ii never looked away ii never bliinked ii never **VIIRU2 RUN THE disciplined for transgressing unauthorized data** fuck the empiire fuck the empiire the movement liive2 you cant have me iill hiide iin the wiire2 ii wiill never take you to world2 that matter ii wiill diie and you cant have me** 2Y2TEM FAIILURE LIFE SUPPORT TERMINATED ****ABANDON 2HIIP** and she kii22ed me no he kii22ed me hii2 liip2 are warm ii ta2te the 2un he kii22ed me and everythiing_

_broke_

_down_

The first explosion is a bright yellow flash from the console panel behind the column of organic wiring that houses the pilot. It's a burst of almost comfortably warm pressure that pushes down on the Sufferer's face from all angles and caves in his eardrums before he can even hear the roar. After that, his vivid red blood running in tiny creeks down his neck and into the collar of his filthy shirt, he experiences the destruction of the battleship as a series of strong vibrations and foul-smelling wisps of smoke from every corner of the room as the ship burns and rips itself to pieces from the inside out.

The lights in the chamber dim and flare along with the shaking of the ship in its death agony. The platform jumps under his feet, sliding several inches to one side, and he wraps both arms around the Psiioniic. Slimy wet pink fingers of spasming tentacle slide down around his arms and face, streaking him with pinkish fluid as they fall sheared and twitching from the quaking ceiling. The platform shudders, the ceiling seems to bounce, and it rains magenta and tangles of biowire and cables frayed and sparking and he _does not let go_.

The flesh of the tentacle mass is corpse-cold and twitching to the beat of the destruction but goddamn it he doesn't care. He leans into the Psiioniic with everything he's got, and when the platform finally jerks out from under his feet for the last time he's still cheek to blood-slimed cheek with his friend, red and yellow smearing into orange between them. The ship dies like an insanely thrashing beast, trying to throw both of them off, and the Sufferer fights back because that's all he's fucking good for, fighting back when there's no fucking point, and he thinks _bring it on, you piece of shit _and he's pretty sure he's laughing, or maybe he's crying, who the fuck knows or cares.

He neither sees nor feels the explosion that wipes out the control chamber as it tears the ship in two. He is distracted by a weak brush of fingers on the back of his neck, cold and wet and clumsy. For one spinning and disoriented moment he has no fucking idea whose hand it is and he panics, because he was alone in here when the ship started to go bugfuck, it was just him and-

_oh_

-just as the entire chamber cants sharply to the left, the air in his lungs is torn from him by a sudden cold pressure, and the darkness behind his squeezed-shut eyes goes as white and painful as a magnesium fire, he realizes whose hand it is.

Being torn apart hurts. It hurts a lot. Almost enough to take his attention away from the feeling of savage joy that goes ripping through him like a jolt of electricity, spreading out from the touch of that hand, from the cheek against his cheek that is suddenly warm and wet with someone's tears and his last thought before the fire takes them both is _fuck yes._

- _He stands above the smoking ruins of the village and watches the drones take the hives apart, methodically placing corpses and parts of corpses in the same transport containers as blasted chunks of concrete and tangled rebar still twisted in the shape of the explosion that nearly melted them._

Glory to the Empire. _The lowbloods in that village gave him shelter on the wrong dry summer day, gave him an audience for his story, and then the wrong rumor of the Signless made it into the wrong ear, and now it's all just a patch of scorched earth. A mistake being unmade, like a wriggler erasing an incorrect answer on a schoolfeeding board._

_His fingers are white-knuckle tight on the grip of his sickle. The black rage he's fought his entire life wants to pour into his weapon and go find someone to kill for this._

_"You got away safe," a voice from behind. He whirls to face the stranger, already swinging, aiming for a neck shot, and he's fast as fuck and he has excellent aim so there should be a corpse at his feet, but instead he's frozen in the middle of his reflexive act of murder, and his sickle is wrapped in a vulgar red and blue fog that glows in the twilight._

_"Sorry," says the yellowblood, putting up his hands to show that he's unarmed. He's young, maybe even younger than the Signless, and he has those weird glowy eyes that you sometimes get with high level psionics. The same colors as his hold on the sickle, of fucking course. And an extra set of horns. The mutant extra pair is still larger and pointier than the horns of the Signless, which is annoying. "I should have figured you'd be jumpy, what with getting my entire village torched and all."_

_"What the fuck!" is all the Signless can manage, trying to yank his sickle free of the glow. It's pointless, but he's pissed off enough not to care. "Lemme go, you nook-blistering fuckhole!"_

_"That's gotta be why everyone listens to you. So articulate." The yellowblood half-grins and holy shit he has the worst set of snaggleteeth the Signless has ever seen. No wonder he mangles his speech. "I happened to miss your meeting and the Imperial bloodbath party that followed, but at least I got to meet the man himself. Aren't I lucky?"_

_"Are you planning to kill me?" snarls the Signless. "Because I've had a fucking lousy week, and I'd be glad to cull a skinny lisping piece of shit psionic on a hillside to top the whole thing off."_ "I'm thinking about it," the psionic shrugs. "I had a friend at that meeting. Pretty girl with curly short hair and one horn broken off, she wouldn't stop talking about you when you came to town. She would have wanted me to let you go on account of you're some nutty revolutionary prophet, but oh, hey, she's dead. Maybe that charred lump they're pulling out of the rubble is her, what do you think? I can't tell from up here." His voice cracks a little. "She's the one who helped me after my ship... after I got back from serving..." he trails off. "Shit, man," says the Signless, feeling exhausted. "I wish I had never come here. This is so fucked up." "Glad we agree, o divine wanderer," the stranger snorts back a bitter laugh. "Spreading the good word and the flames of the Empire all in one night. You are one efficient little shit-stirrer." "Fuck you, I'm trying to stop the fucking Empire!" the Signless shoots back. "You'd know that if you knew the first fucking thing about me."

_"Yeah, well." the stranger sighs. "The thing is, they're paying attention. Like you might actually be a threat. Look how fast the place went up. That was a coordinated strike, and I can't figure out why they'd even bother."_

_The Signless frowns. He's been traveling for a sweep now, telling people his stories, trying to get that light of _memory_ to come on in someone else's eyes, trying to prove he's not insane when he dreams about the other world. He has come to expect danger, but this attack was on a wholly different scale. "Maybe I won't kill you," the stranger says, "Or... I don't fucking know. I keep changing my mind." He runs a hand through his hair and growls, looking distracted and a little bit unhinged. "Why is the Empire taking time out of its busy schedule of being completely fucking evil to try and personally squish one lone crazy prophet scampering around the fucking boondocks?" The stranger glares at him, gets right up in the face of the Signless and examines him like some kind of alien bug. When he gets up close, the Signless sees he has rows of small dimpled pinprick scars all around his creepy glowing eyes. It reminds the Sufferer of something he's seen in a movie, something that turned his stomach, but he can't remember exactlywhat. Something about battleships. "Tell me what you told them." The sickle removes itself from his hand floats over to the stranger, who tosses it into a bush (ignoring the squawk from the Sufferer) and sits on the dusty ground, beckoning the Signless to join him. The dirt is dry and barren this close to the desert, but it's still warm from the day even as the night begins to chill. The stranger is seated across from him under a bleak smoky red sky as the last of the light fades and the long night begins. The Signless looks for stars and doesn't see any through the haze._

_"Tell me everything. Tell me what got them all killed," the stranger continues, "and then I'll decide what to do about you."_

_"All right," says the Signless, already mourning his lost sickle, and takes a breath._

* * *

><p>Chapter 10: sunrise consoles at the break of dawn<p>

The second time the Sufferer wakes up in the middle of his own death is much like the first. He stands on the very tips of his toes, which is all he can manage because of how high they've hoisted his chains, the space between each bare toe a paste of sweat and dirt and blood from the sharp things he's stumbled over during his march to the flogging jut. It doesn't hurt much.

More immediate in his senses is the feeling of manacles, red and glowing around the smoking ruins of his wrists. The metal is so hot it burns cold and bites right through his pain, bites into a curious deep numbness that's almost pleasant around the edges. He can hear the roar of a vast crowd below, though he can't see much because his right eyes is swollen shut and the best he can manage on the left side is a smeary half-mast squint.

The good citizens of the Imperial city have gathered on Her Imperious Condescension's command to observe the occasion. This is the execution of the biggest asshole on the planet, and he has the privilege to be the guest of honor at the barbecue.

Barbecue. The smell of his flesh bubbling away and carbonizing, so like roasting meat if he doesn't think about how that's himself he smells. Barbecue. All his life and his work and all his anger and it all comes down to this morbid joke: cattle crowding close to watch one of their own roasted on a spit. Just another day at the abattoir.

And they aren't celebrating his death, not really. That would nearly make this worth it. Give him something to protest with his death. Something doomed and righteous to cling to as he's tortured to death. Another few sweeps of freedom from discomfort and unrest, that's what they hope for. The end of uncertainty, at least for a little while longer. His death means the trouble is over, and they will be allowed to return of the complacency that gets them through another day, another night, another lifetime. They want to live in passive livestock peace, and so he burns. And so he dies.

And so nothing is changed.

Did he honestly think anyone could ever hope to lead this passive crowd of observers to an actual rebellion? Did he ever truly believe, even a little bit, that people would choose his path over another day of easy misery?

_Fuck,_ he would flog him too.

He watched the manacles heating from gray to red and knew in his bones that he could do this, he could really die like this, if it meant something. But he knows better now. These herdbeasts see his grand gesture and heave a giant collective sigh of relief instead of an outcry. He is no hero, he's the currency with which the lowbloods of Alternia will buy the false comfort of apathy for a few more sweeps. The Empire will play along and placate them until the mutters die down. Until everyone is suitably impressed by this object lesson on the futility of trying to rise up against the will of the people. Because this Alternia is not what the people want, but they'll take it. They'll always fucking take it, and that's what really matters.

This isn't martyrdom. It's garbage day.

That's the thought that breaks him, in the end.

He decides, calmly and after some deliberation on the matter, to open his mouth and scream. Except he finds he can't do that, because he's already screaming, has in fact been gabbling and begging and cursing and laughing all this time and he never even noticed it. Has he really been too busy losing his faith to notice he's also lost his mind? Always the last to know about these things. His hands are two limp gray paws, pale and dead and slow-roasting in the manacles. His arms don't even hurt anymore. What he does feel is immense chill, all through his body, and a curious lifting sensation. And rage. Rage like he's never felt before, even at his worst, a rage so bright it burns right through his heart and fills him with broken glass and fury and all the words he's been too idealistic to voice. And it overflows, and he lets it. Serves them right.

So this is the day he dies. He hopes it will be quick. Then he wonders how he can be so curiously detached. That lifting feeling swells until it's like part of him is floating above himself, looking down and waiting to see what comes next.

_No, wait._

The arrow comes next. He remembers now.

Blue-flocked arrow. Right in the side, hitting something vital. Barely hurts. The troll who fired it is aiming for a quick kill, and he will be grateful as the life pumps out of him in a slowly weakening tide of vivid red. That garish blood wrote his death warrant. From the moment he was picked up by kind hands and given a name, he's been working up to this last moment, and-

But-

_Something isn't right._

He looks down. Even with his eyes mostly swollen shut, he can see that it hasn't happened yet. His body is bloody and he's probably dying, yes, but there's no arrow. He can remember it before it happened. _How is that possible?_

He wonders what's happening to his companions right now. If he knows the Empire, they're watching from somewhere. Getting an eyeful of what awaits them once their leader is dead. The gentle Dolorosa who taught him and raised him and let him go off to die when his dreams told him to. The slightly mad warrior Disciple with her whispers about a love beyond the quadrants, a love that is the quadrants, and how he actually believed her a little, in the end. The Psiioniic, who escaped the control room of a Fleet battleship for a life of peace, only to lose it all again, and find the Movement in its ashes.

He worries about the Psiioniic the most. The Empire only tortures and kills its rebels. Its turncoats _really_ pay.

Something about this thought hurts him deep down in his gut, right around where the arrow will strike in a few moments, and he thinks, _the bastards put him back in a ship, they put him back and they kept him alive until something finally came along and put him out of his misery._

And it all comes back. The arrow cuts a graceful arc through the crowd noise, slices through the wind, and punches through his flesh with a _thrum_ that seems somehow smug. He doesn't bother looking at it. This is the third time he's had to get shot to death, and he doesn't know how it's possible to become tired of your own agonizing death, but he is. He squeezes his puffy eyelids together, takes a deep breath that fills his lungs with greasy smoke and the aroma of fear-sweat and roasting herdbeast, and tells himself this is the absolute last time he attends his own execution.

_Fuck this,_ he thinks, and lets go. He is pulled into the sky like smoke. Far below, he hears his memory-self scream the obscenity that is his dying gift to the world. _I have somewhere I need to be._

Dry sand under his elbows, his palms, his ass, the heels of his bare feet. The weight of gravity pulls him down in an unrelenting embrace, forces away the last of the floating sensation. Invisible arms press his naked body down and it's cool and gritty and very strange. He hears a dull roar from everywhere, and wonders if he's still deaf. Then his first surprised breath brings the smell of ocean, and he sits up in one surprised motion and opens his eyes, and it doesn't hurt.

The sky is velvet-black and starless behind masses of clouds that look like a thunderstorm waiting to happen. It fills his vision, this stretch of night on water that goes on forever. Crashing waves rush at him in dim white curls of foam, but he's well above the high-tide line. That's good. It's cold enough already without being wet.

The Psiioniic, on the other hand, is actually sitting in the water. Every wave that breaks and recedes around him leaves a frothy yellow-white scum of bubbles on his bare gray back and sides. His knees are pulled up to his chest and his head rests on his folded forearms, facing away and out to sea. The tide pulls at him and pushes him away by turns, and he doesn't seem to notice that he's slowly sinking into the water and sand. The Sufferer can't see his face, but his hair is longer than it was. He's also much scrawnier than the Sufferer has ever seen him. Bits of sickly pink tentacle still cling to his back and hair, smeared magenta stains running down his back to where the waves have washed him clean.

And it's him.

He's still wearing the headset, but it's him.

The Sufferer struggles to his feet and rushes forward, forgetting how cold he is, forgetting that he's naked, forgetting that he's dead, forgetting everything but the way the sand sprays out under his feet when he runs down the beach to the water's edge. The waves growl around them both as he falls to his knees in the freezing surf. He wraps his arms around those starved shoulders and buries his face in the soft hollow of that neck, and he finds the skin surprisingly warm. He doesn't know what will come next, doesn't know what to say, doesn't care. They might still be here like this ten sweeps from now, and he doesn't give a shit. He's freezing his ass off and cutting his knees on bits of broken shell, and if that's how this goes for the rest of eternity, he's okay with that. He has all the time in the fucking world, and not one goddamn word in his head, and he doesn't care. He clings and feels the warmth of his friend's skin, and lets go of everything.

The Psiioniic doesn't reach for him, but his head comes to rest against the Sufferer's, the edges of his goggles unyielding and uncomfortable against his scalp. Yet again the Sufferer finds something to not give a shit about. _Alive,_ he's thinking. _Alive, alive, alive._ It's an insane little mantra, a tiny rodent racing around in the void where his thinkpan used to be, scrabbling at the corners and darting about in quick little movements. _Alive._

"Is this right." a raspy voice finally breaks through the moment. It's barely a question. The Sufferer pulls away and gapes, comprehending nothing but the fact that the Psiioniic has spoken to him. He hasn't looked at him, but he has spoken.

"Is this right. The ocean. Is it how you remember." The Psiioniic says again, tells the water. His eyes are unreadable behind the headset goggles. Several of the biomech wires have come loose and their limp needles hang half-exposed from the flesh of his temples, all life gone from the flesh that once kept them embedded. He could probably pull them all out, but he hasn't. The Sufferer doesn't know why he hasn't, and that internal chant of _alive-alive-alive_ takes on a hysterical edge.

"CG."

The scampering creature in his empty head finds a hole in the wall and vanishes, and finally the words register. He also realizes he has been staring.

"You... made this?" he finally asks.

"I wanted to be where you said. The beach. I wanted..." the Psiioniic's mouth creases into a frown. "I wanted it to be like you described, and we were here."

"It's beautiful." The Sufferer answers. "Cold as fuck, though."

"Is the cold right?" the Psiioniic presses, more life coming into his voice, still looking out into the dark.

"It was cold in my dream, yeah."

"Then I got it right." Obvious relief in his tone.

"Except the stars. There aren't any stars." The Sufferer says.

"I didn't want any stars." the Psiioniic says, and his shoulders go suddenly stiff. "It can be right without stars, can't it?"

"Shit, if you want. The clouds mostly hid them in my dream, anyway."

"Is the beach too small? I can't remember how sand goes."

"It's fine. There are some dunes behind us, with tall grass." He removes an arm from the Psiioniic, hating to lose that much contact, and describes a shape with his hand. "Like that."

"Can you make them?" The Psiioniic asks. "Please?"

"You've been doing fine on your own-"

"But it has to be_ right."_ The Psiioniic insists. "It needs to be the way you said and I can't remember grass."

The Sufferer frowns, and thinks about it. He feels the _listening_ like in his garden, and the quality of the wind-sound subtly alters. There's a rustling now. Tall grass he can't see is rippling in the constant wind as it slides up and across the new swell of beach dunes. "There."

"Thank you," the Psiioniic tells him, and only then does he turn to look directly at the Sufferer. "Thank you."

"It's just some dunes." the Sufferer says.

"It has to be the way you said," the Psiioniic repeats. "The calendar broke and nothing was real for so long. And you came and told me about this place, and now it's real. It has to be right or I might..." he loses his voice for a moment. "I might forget again."

"You won't forget," the Sufferer tells him. "That's all over now."

"I wanted to have hands," the Psiioniic continues, wondering. "And then I had keep disappearing, but when I remember, they come back. I've been trying to remember to keep having hands while you were asleep. CG, where are we?"

"I don't know. Wherever we go after we die, I guess."

"Will it stay real?" That pleading note in his voice makes the Sufferer's gut squeeze.

"If you want it to." he says, and hopes it's true.

"I do," the Psiioniic says. "Please."

"Can we go somewhere that's not naked in the ocean?" the Sufferer finally asks. "I mean, we had clothes in my dream and I think my shame globes may have actually fallen off-"

"Yeah. Only..." the Psiioniic trails off. "I need you to do me two favors."

"Okay," the Sufferer says.

"Can you take this off?" he gestures at his face, at the goggles he's still wearing. "I don't want... I don't want to touch it."

"Gladly." The Suffer reaches for the headset, digging his fingers under the edges and feeling hot skin underneath. He is relieved to find that the goggles haven't grown into his friend's skin after so many sweeps. "Do I have to do anything special?"

"Just pull them off," the Psiioniic says, his voice rising until it's close to a whine. "As fast as you can."

And he does. Needles pull free of skin, nerve connections tear loose where the bioware has fused with his own tissue, and more of that horrible magenta streams out of the torn wire and flesh. The noise the Psiioniic makes when he pulls the last of the connectors loose is heartbreaking. As soon as he's removed the headset and unwound it from where it's wrapped around the double set of horns, he cocks back his arm and hurls the thing into the black water. It will probably wash back up in the tide, but he feels better after he's watched it sink.

The Psiioniic's eyes are squeezed shut. yellow blood runs down his cheeks like tears, mixing with the magenta fluid and carrying it away.

"Second favor?" he prompts, trying to sound brisk and failing.

"Do I have..." the Psiioniic begins, timidly. "Tell me if I still have eyes."

"Open them and let me see."

The Psiioniic complies, and there's a moment where neither of them moves or breathes. "Well?"

"They're still there," the Sufferer tells him. "Except they're white."

"Oh," the Psiioniic says, obvious relief in his voice, and his face relaxes from the grimace he's been holding for an eternity. "Like yours, then."

"What, really?" the Sufferer can't remember having seen a reflection of himself since he died. "That's fucking creepy."

The Sufferer helps the Psiioniic stand on legs he has to continually remember back into existence, helps him stagger across the wet sand toward the dunes, and imagines clothes for both of them. For good measure, he conjures up a small shelter from the wind, assuring the Psiioniic that it's all right to make new things that weren't in his dream. The Psiioniic is superstitious about the reality here, which is a little unnerving, but the Sufferer shrugs this off. Over a thousand sweeps as a machine would unhinge anybody. Under the circumstances, a little paranoia is nothing.

"We can make anything?" he asks, eventually, stroking the fabric of his sweater with childlike reverence. Textures fascinate him. His own fingers fascinate him. The sweater is wool, scratchy and rough, and he relishes the way it blocks the cold of the night air, even though he likes the cold. He misses the shocking skin-slap of the freezing water, as unfamiliar to him as the sight of his own bare feet. He has so many toes. How is he supposed to keep the nails trimmed? And walking is completely bizarre. So many muscles to control. He files malfunction reports when he reaches out for his engines and feels nothing but wool and sand and soft warm skin under hands he still can't quite figure out. He's never had them before.

Except he did, once. For a short time when he was very young, before he became the Helmsman and could reach across the sky with eyes that saw through subspace. The sensors in his hands pick up tactile stimuli and temperature readings, which he can't interpret because he is missing that part of his programming. His only remaining cameras and auditory sensors are in his head and don't seem to connect with any logic. The various parts of him send signals into his brain, and the signals often make no sense. The Signless tells him he is cold, and the sweater he gives him makes his skin send signals that mean _warm_. He likes being warm. He also likes the way his hair feels when it falls into his eyes, even when it stings and he has to move the hair away with his hand.

He likes the way his teeth taste. His tongue is so wonderfully sensitive. Has he really had it in his mouth all this time?

"Who am I now?" he asks. "I can't be the Helmsman anymore. I exploded."

"The ship exploded," the Signless corrects him. "_You_ died."

"I felt myself torn into pieces. My hull split right in two. Now I'm just the body of the pilot."

"That's you." the Signless explains, patiently. They will have this conversation, or one very like it, many times in the future, and the Signless will try not to be too irritable about it. "The parts of you that are still here are you."

"But where do I file my _reports?"_ the Psiioniic sounds exasperated, stroking his hair and the hair of the Sufferer in turn, methodically, comparing the textures. They're different. His hair is smoother and finer, and the Sufferer's hair is coarse and refuses to lie flat. He wants to touch the hair of both of them at once, but he's not sure yet how to interpret signals from two hands at the same time. The Sufferer rolls his eyes and puts up with this, feeling amused and sad at the same time.

"You don't."

"That makes no sense. What if something malfunctions?"

"If anything comes up, just tell me."

"Are you the captain?"

"No. You are."

The Psiioniic has to think about this for a very long time. "I don't think I want to be the captain," he finally decides. "I don't know how."

"You'll pick it up as you go. You have time."

"That's another thing. How do we know the time?"

"Does it matter?"

"YES."

"Make a clock." the Sufferer finally decides. "A really accurate one. Set it to the last reading you can be sure of, and start from there."

"What if my clock stops working?" The Psiioniic forgets his hands again for a moment, but they come back clenched in anxious fists. The feel of white knuckles and a pounding heart is amazing. "Look, my fingers are folded."

"I'll keep a clock," the Sufferer says. "We'll both have them, and you can check with mine if you need to. My sense of time is perfect."

"All right." the Psiioniic's hands relax and he starts poking at the needle marks on his face. The pain is not new to him, but the sensation of his own skin under his fingers is very different. The hurting isn't in his fingers, so it's almost like touching someone else's face and feeling little swollen lumps that hurt and are sticky. The sticky is blood, and the Sufferer bats his hand away and tells him not to pick at his face. He files this away as an order and does not do it again.

"Will there be others?" he asks later. It might be hours later, curled up together with his head in the lap of the Sufferer, or sweeps. He'll check the clocks in a little while. He feels slowed down, which the Sufferer tells him is drowsiness. He remembers drowsiness, a little. His eyes won't stay open, but his thoughts are still racing through him. He closes his eyes and listens to the sound of another vascular system against his ear. The sensory input is filed away as pleasant. Fingers in his hair are likewise comfortable.

"Other trolls?"

"Yes."

"I don't know. Maybe. I mean, I found you, didn't I?"

"Yes." he considers, but his thoughts are slowing down. "Will we find your Guardian? The Disciple? I want to meet them. I remember them from before."

"Maybe. We can look for them later."

"They won't appear if we want them to, will they?"

"I don't think so." the Sufferer has tried this before, and has only conjured up the memories of them. Maybe it means the real Dolorosa and Disciple are somewhere else. He decides to find out.

"If we find them, maybe we can make it again."

"Make what again?"

"The other world. We can do that, can't we? We made this place. What if we can make Alternia the way it was?"

"Shit," the Sufferer says. "Maybe."

"Your stories will be true," the Psiioniic decides. "We'll make them..." and he yawns. "Why did I make that noise just now?"

"Because you're falling asleep, dumbass."

"Oh. It's normal?" This is his favorite sensation yet. He will have to ask about this feeling tomorrow. He wants to know the word for when the system is stable like this. And why his stomach feels growly and he keeps thinking about apples.

"Yeah. Go to sleep already. I won't disappear or anything."

"Okay. But... I want _that_ to be real next," the Psiioniic says, wistfully, and his ridiculous teeth flash in the dark in another jaw-cracking yawn. He settles himself closer to the Sufferer and feels the warm spread from his skin into his head. "I want to make the other world. You fixed me. Now you can... make... everything right... like it should be..." he nods off mid-thought, fading into sleep without any system subroutines or orders to induce a dormant state.

The Sufferer stays awake, considering, for a long time after the Psiioniic's breathing takes on the same slow rhythm as the crashing waves on the beach below. He looks down at his friend's face, at his closed eyes and slight smile, at his mess of overgrown hair. He's picked the biowire fragments out of the Psiioniic's hair and combed all the dried slime away with his fingers. The marks on his face are already starting to fade, which is probably a good sign.

_You fixed me._

_No,_ he wants to say,_ I think maybe you fixed_ me. Because that's what this feels like. The great would-be savior finally scores a point against the bitch goddess of Fate. Sure he had to die first, but who's holding a grudge?

And... _make_ the other world? Can they do that, find others and create the Alternia of his dreams out of nothing? It might be possible, now that he's got the Psiioniic to make it for. And he misses his garden. There would be room in the other world to have it back, and maybe not spend all his time under his tree alone and watching ghosts this time.

Maybe that's why he's here. A second chance. For both of them. For whoever else they find.

_Who knows,_ he thinks, and sneaks some stars into the sky above the shelter, just for himself to fall asleep under. _Stranger shit has happened to me today._

END

* * *

><p>Notes:<p>

So that's it for my story, y'all. I hope you liked it.

Now for some trivia!

1. The gibberish text in the Helmsman's readout is not random. I did a Google image search for The Lord's Prayer and selected Result #2 (do everything in twos), which was this image. When I saw the shaky childlike handwriting and red and blue writing I was like YES. So I opened the image in Notepad and pasted the characters the file was rendered into, in the order they were rendered, so that part of that picture ended up fused with the story text. This sort of thing appeals to me for goofball art reasons.

2. **64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20 64 65 6c 69 69 76 65 72 20 75 32 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 65 76 69 69 6c 20** is hex code. All those lovely 69s boil down to more of the Lord's Prayer.

3. This fic was named after, and takes heavy influence from, the beautiful song "A Sailorman's Hymn" by the band Kamelot.


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